In 2012  Marina Keegan, a graduating senior at Yale, published an article called “The Opposite of Loneliness” in the Yale Daily News. “There’s no one word for it,” Keegan lamented, “but if there were, I could say that’s what I want in life.” It’s not quite love and not quite community, she mused, “it’s just this feeling that there are people, an abundance of people, who are in this together. Who are on your team. When the check is paid and you stay at the table. That night with the guitar. That night we can’t remember. That time we did, we went, we saw, we laughed, we felt. The hats!”

There’s warmth in these kinds of conversations, and gladness, too. We’ve all had them — at birthday parties, special events, and anniversary parties, too — of marriages and, maybe, even of a denomination’s founding. Thoughts of the past remind us  how blessed we are and how faithful God has been to us. 

Adam Grant, an organizational psychologist at Wharton, has found that people laugh five times more when they’re with others than when they’re alone. In a recent article by Miami pastor Eric Bancroft, Grant reports that it even brightens our day to speak to a passing stranger  or to say “thank you” to the cashier at the grocery store. That’s not to say you can’t enjoy a movie or book by yourself. But the fact is, Grant says, that “peak happiness”
comes in the company of others. 

People laugh five times more when they’re with others than when their alone.

The research shows that we’re at our best and happiest in moments of what 20th-century sociologist Émile Durkheim called “collective effervescence.” We may not know the term, but we’ve all experienced the phenomenon. It comes in conversation with friends, like the one Marina Keegan had. We see it in sports when teammates, together, are in “the zone.” We hear it in church, too, when the congregation joins together and sings from the heart as if they were one. 

This isn’t happenstance; it’s how we’re made. By God’s design, our emotions are contagious. They spread from one person to another, not just at celebratory concerts, or college football games, or during warm conversations. It happens when scientists come together to create a new vaccine, when neighbors join in common cause, when artists collaborate on music, movies, and plays. And even when church elders come together — in presbytery meetings or a General Assembly — to discuss better ways for their church to move forward.  

It happens throughout communities and cultures, too, Grant explains. Psychologists have found that wherever people pursue happiness individually, there’s a good chance they’ll end up lonelier than before. But where they pursue happiness socially — through connecting with others, caring for neighbors, and contributing to the common good — they’re more likely to be happy.

This sounds like groundbreaking news because so many people have learned to think of themselves primarily as individuals. They’ve forgotten — or perhaps never understood — that they’re meant to play an indispensable role in lives of others and in the health of their churches, neighborhood, and community. Individual rights, interests, and identities now take precedence. 

Church members experience the joy of seeing how their lives, their hope, their love for Christ, and their faithfulness to His Word animates the lives of others.

But from the beginning of time, says Bancroft, God has created mankind to live in community. Early in the Bible, for example, God provided Adam with a helper suitable for him. When Moses faltered, God made Aaron his lieutenant, to strengthen and encourage him. Jesus gathered 12 disciples to be His students and friends. Throughout Scripture, “The movement has always been from the one to the many,” Bancroft says. 

Moving into the New Testament and the development of the local church, we see how believers are drawn out of themselves and, in Bancroft’s words, “put into a family of new siblings, all of whom have the same Father.” They get to know one another. They bear each other’s burdens. They learn from one another. They encourage each other. Together, they pursue “the upward call of Jesus” (Philippians 3:14). And experience the joy of how their lives, their hope, their love for Christ, and their faithfulness to His Word animates the lives of others (1 Thessalonians 1:8-9). 

“As a log burns brighter in a pile of wood, the Christian knows greater joy in the tight community of the local church,” Bancroft writes. Such joy is the natural byproduct of rejoicing with those who rejoice and weeping with those weep (Romans 12:15). It comes from seeing how the Holy Spirit draws people away from their own self-interest to care for others. And it never fades for very long, because it’s rooted in the shared hope of redemption, when “[God] will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore” (Revelation 21:4). And when “the mountains and the hills shall break forth into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands” (Isaiah 55:12).