Community from Square One

  I want to talk about cliques. As a youth pastor, I deal with them regularly, but cliques are not unique to students. Cliques show up in adult spaces just as frequently, and if we're talking about building community in new spaces, it would be worth our time to talk about it.    Let us start at the brain. Your brain has an unconscious prioritization system that is active during the thousands of choices you make every moment of every day.  And it goes like this... Will I survive? Am I Safe? What will give me the greatest satisfaction? (Either by increasing pleasure or decreasing pain) That second question, "Am I Safe," is where cliques live. Cliques are, first and foremost, a tool of safety; I hang out with these people because they protect me from getting killed and eaten by other people.   This group is my tribe because I feel safe with them. Cliques equal tribes. Do you remember back in the day when we used to build walls around our cities to keep us safe from outside i

  What was the best advice you received for making new friends?  Did it work?  Or, instead, does it work every single time you're looking for a friend?  How often do you need new friends?  Where do you start?  I seriously think there is an untapped market for an algorithm-based sorting app that matches you up with a potential new friend—a friendship Tinder.  A Friender!  (Sometimes my brilliance for naming things astounds me)  Once that app launches, loneliness will be cured forever.  The problem with friends isn't that there aren't enough "fish in the sea." The problem is that its hard work to get to the point where being friends doesn't feel like work.  Maybe because we see such amplified and dramatized friendship standards in tv and movies so often that we've been given impossibly high standards?  Yes, I'm talking about you, Gilmore Girls.  What are the rules anyway?  How do we prioritize all the helpful advice?  Do "birds of a feather flock to

Do you have any family nearby? That's the number one question I have been asked. There's seems to be an unspoken rule that you are not supposed to move away that stands behind every follow-up question when you tell people you're moving across the country. It's not normal to move so far away. Human history has long favored staying close to home, with only a few exceptions of those who explored the world. It's funny how we praise and honor those that leave home to wander while the majority never go far from the familiar landscape of our upbringing. I remember reading an article talking about some remote area in England where researchers did a DNA study on the local populace, and they had found out that no one ever moved far from home for some thousand years. It makes sense, right? Why leave the tribe and risk getting lost, robbed, or killed? Why leave the established community and start over? Even the nomadic cultures never went far from home! They just moved the comm