In 2024, psychologist Jonathan Haidt published data that should stop every church leader cold.
In The Anxious Generation, Haidt documents what he calls the “great rewiring” of childhood — the decade from 2010–2015 when smartphones and social media displaced the relational habits that had structured human life for millennia. The result is a generation that is, by nearly every measurable indicator, lonelier, more anxious, and more socially isolated than any before it.1
But Haidt is careful to note that the crisis didn’t begin with teenagers. It began with adults who had quietly accepted a vision of the good life built around individual fulfilment — and then handed that vision, via an algorithm, to their children.
We were made for community. And we have slowly, almost imperceptibly, let it go.
The Story We’ve Been Told
Carl Trueman, in Strange New World, traces the rise of what he calls “expressive individualism” — the modern belief that the self is an inner psychological reality to be discovered and expressed, rather than a creature shaped by community, tradition, and covenant.2
This is not simply a secular drift. It is a formation — and it runs deep. We have been discipled by a culture that tells us that our highest purpose is to be true to ourselves, that our deepest needs are personal rather than communal, and that relationships are valuable insofar as they serve our individual growth and wellbeing.
Philosopher James K.A. Smith puts it this way: we are not primarily thinking things or believing things — we are loving things. And what we love is shaped by the practices that surround us.3 The liturgies of modern consumer culture — the scroll, the stream, the curated feed — form us into isolated individuals who experience community as an accessory rather than a necessity.
This is the broken normal we have inherited. And it is the normal that the gospel refuses to accept.
The Disruption
From the very beginning, we were made for relationship — with God, with one another, with the world around us. But since the Fall, all of those relationships have fractured. And here is the subtle tragedy: we have gotten used to it.
Distance from God feels normal. Conflict and isolation in human relationships feel normal. We have normalised the brokenness. And because it is normal, we barely notice how much we are missing.
Then Jesus enters. And what He brings is not comfort for the broken status quo. It is disruption.
The early church, described in Acts 2, is one of the most counter-cultural communities in the history of the world:
“They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer… All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favour of all the people.” — Acts 2:42–47
Read that slowly. This is not a small group that meets fortnightly. This is a community that ate together daily. That sold possessions. That organised their entire economic and social life around one another. By every measure of modern individualism, this community was extreme. By the measure of the gospel, it was simply normal.
It was the disrupted life made visible.
A New Command and a New Standard
When Jesus gathered His disciples on the night of His betrayal, He gave them something He called a new commandment:
“A new command I give you: love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.” — John 13:34–35
The Old Testament had already commanded love for neighbours. So what is new here?
Two things. First, the standard: not “as yourself” but “as I have loved you.” Jesus is raising the benchmark from natural affection to cruciform love — love that costs something, love that does not calculate its own interests first. Second, the function: this love is explicitly witness. The watching world will know who you are not by your theology or your buildings or your programmes, but by the quality of your love for one another.
The Apostle Paul takes this further in Ephesians 2, reminding a fractured church that Christ himself “has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility… His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity” (Ephesians 2:14–16). The gospel doesn’t just reconcile individuals to God. It reconciles people to each other. If you think the gospel is only about your personal salvation, Paul would gently suggest you’ve missed the width of it.
Not an Ideal. A Reality.
It is tempting, faced with a vision this demanding, to spiritualise it into something we admire from a safe distance.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer refused to let us do that. Writing from within a Christian community in Nazi Germany — a context where the cost of community was literally mortal — he said this:
“Christian community is not an ideal we must realise; it is a reality created by God in Christ in which we may participate.”4
This is the thing we must not miss. The community described in Acts 2 is not a target we strain toward. It is a reality we are invited into. Christ has done the reconciling work. The wall is down. The family exists. Our task is not to build it but to inhabit it — to live as though the dividing walls are already broken, because they are.
James K.A. Smith would add that we inhabit it through practice. The communal rhythms of Acts 2 — teaching, fellowship, breaking bread, prayer — are not incidental to the community. They form the community. Shared liturgies create shared loves. You cannot sustain the kind of community described in Acts 2 without the practices that make it possible: eating together, praying together, opening homes, bearing burdens, returning after offence.5
Community is not what happens when sufficiently nice people gather. It is what forms when a people submit themselves, together, to the shaping power of the gospel.
Three Invitations
1. Refuse the comfortable distance
The normalised version of church is attendance. You show up, you sing, you listen, you leave. The gospel calls us to something categorically different: devotion. Acts 2:42 uses that word deliberately. The early believers were not occasional participants. They were committed to one another’s formation, care, and witness.
Where are you settling for attendance when the gospel is calling you to devotion?
2. Open what you have
The Acts 2 community sold possessions. That is not presented as a heroic exception — it is presented as the natural outflow of shared life in the Spirit. Generosity is what happens when you stop seeing your resources as primarily yours.
This is radical in a culture of scarcity anxiety. But it is resurrection logic: the God who raised Jesus from the dead is not short of provision. We live from abundance, not fear.
3. Love past convenience
Bonhoeffer again: “We belong to one another only through and in Jesus Christ.”6 That means the basis of our community is not compatibility, common interests, or even mutual affection. It is a shared Lord. And that means the community extends further than feels natural — to those who are different, difficult, or costly to love.
Jesus was clear: loving people who love you back is no great achievement (Luke 6:32). The disruption of community is the call to love past the point of convenience, all the way to the enemies and strangers and people who exhaust you.
That is where the world sits up and pays attention.
The Community the World Is Waiting For
Jonathan Haidt, who is not a Christian, has spent years documenting the social collapse produced by the triumph of individualism. In The Righteous Mind, he concluded that humans are “90% chimp, 10% bee” — fundamentally self-interested, but with a latent capacity for collective life that, when activated, produces extraordinary things.7
He is right about the capacity. He is right about the hunger. What he does not have is the source.
The church, at its best, has always been the answer to the loneliness the world cannot name. Not because Christians are nicer, but because we have been drawn into a community that was created not by human effort but by divine act. Christ is our peace. He has made us one.
The world is looking for what Acts 2 describes — a community where the lonely find belonging, the broken find welcome, and love costs something real.
It falls to us to live it.
Post 3 of 7 in the Disruption series. Next: what happens when the gospel disrupts the thing we guard most carefully — power. The Disruption of Power.
Footnotes
- Jonathan Haidt, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness (Penguin Press, 2024). ↩
- Carl Trueman, Strange New World: How Thinkers and Activists Redefined Identity and Sparked the Sexual Revolution (Crossway, 2022), pp. 19–42. ↩
- James K.A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit (Brazos Press, 2016), p. 1. ↩
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together (Harper & Row, 1954), p. 30. ↩
- Smith, You Are What You Love, pp. 79–96. ↩
- Bonhoeffer, Life Together, p. 21. ↩
- Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Pantheon, 2012), p. 291. ↩
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Paul Benger 