Saturday, April 18, 1998

A place where somebody knows your name

By DALE HANSON BOURKE

Religion News Editor

UNDATED -- "Bigger is better!" exclaimed the president of a large bank earlier this week as he announced plans to merge with a second bank to create yet another mega-institution.

His customers were not so sure.

"It's so impersonal," said one woman.

"Will anyone care if you have a problem?" asked a man. "I think you become just a number."

The subject was banks, but it seems a metaphor for life in general these days. People feel lost, overwhelmed, unknown. They say they miss the "good old days," but perhaps the longing is even deeper.

Perhaps it is really a spiritual ache, a need to be intimately understood and valued, what is identified by the psalmist as the soul's thirst for God.

In our societal obsession to build everything from megabanks to megachurches, we must remember that individuals crave intimacy. We all long for places "where everybody knows your name," as the old "Cheers" theme goes.

It is a need that makes TV ensemble shows like "Seinfeld" and "Friends" popular. We all snuggle up to the community of fictional friends for half an hour, sharing inside jokes and knowing glances. And perhaps our national grief over the end of "Seinfeld" is in part an acknowledgment of what is lacking in our own lives.

For many individuals, a religious community helps satisfy the need to be known. There is both the security and familiarity of the liturgy celebrated among the same people week after week.

And religious communities often offer special interest groups that bring together people dealing with similar painful experiences such as divorce, the death of a child or illness. Other groups bring together people interested in reaching out to others through missions or ministry.

Increasingly, small group fellowships are meeting in homes simply to keep growing congregations from losing the personal touch. These small groups have become particularly important to megachurches, where large congregations offer the convenience of many services and an array of options to fit everyone's lifestyle but run the risk of being yet another alienating institution.

A "community" of 5,000 or more people, for example, is hardly intimate and hardly a community. Someone can go to service after service without ever meeting another person.

"People are anxious to make and maintain friendships, and the church has emerged as one of the few places left where they can do so," market researcher George Barna writes in his new book "The Second Coming of the Church" (Word).

But, Barna says, even the church can get caught up in the prevailing secular culture and its worship of bigness.

"The church must address the contradiction between what the Bible exhorts us to pursue spiritually, and what Americans have chosen to pursue, based upon cultural assumptions and preferences," he writes.

Ultimately, the "bigger-is-better" philosophy -- so thoroughly American -- is a direct contradiction of the wisdom found in the Bible, where we are told God numbers the hairs of our head and he knew each of us "before I formed you in the womb."

God is portrayed as a personal savior and one who cares about our every thought. It is a comforting image, especially in a modern and faceless culture.

It is noteworthy, then, that the stories of Jesus are most often stories about individuals. Jesus never seemed concerned about counting the number of converts or measuring his success. But humans -- especially Americans -- love big ideas and big institutions; they want to be part of big movements and have big ideas.

Yet whenever things get too big, individuals get nervous because there is something in each of us that craves intimacy. We need to be in a place where somebody knows our name.

If megabanks and megachurches are to be successful, they must find ways to minimize their bigness and maximize the importance of individuals.