Continuing a series based on Dunbar’s book, “Friends”. You can find the basic thesis here: https://jotsandscribbles.blog/2023/09/18/introduction-to-friends-by-robin-dunbar/
“the big surprise was that when we looked at the patterns of contact before and after changing friendships, they were almost identical. It seems that when we replace someone in our social network with a new friend, we slot the new friend into exactly the same position as that previously occupied by the old friend in terms of the frequency we contact them.”
One of the more surprising ideas that Dunbar explores is that we each have a friendship structure. This is based on research about how young people transition to university, and their phone use before and after. What they found is that while there was a big change in who young people were communicating with over the course of the year, there was a distinctive pattern to how they communicated. The time they spent on their best friend, second best friend and etc down the list of phone contacts remained roughly constant, even if half the people they were calling changed. They appeared to have a distinct social signature. Some might give lots of time fairly evenly for 4 friends, and then again fairly evenly (though much less) for the next 50. Others might have a smooth declining gradient. But this social signature is fairly distinct (different people are different) and appears relatively fixed.
This has a big implication for newcomers to an established church community. The natural thing to do is to look and see which people and social groups we like the look of, and try and join those. And that might work. But it might not. Because the nice people we see may already have filled their friendship group to capacity. If so, they can’t just add more people in, without removing someone from their friendship list. This is not because they are unfriendly. And certainly this is no excuse to be unkind. But friendly people who are established in a place may be relationally maxed out.
So that creates a problem. Because we want new people to church communities to have friends. What do we do?
Firstly, we can create groups where newcomers can mix with established members. In these groups, we spend time together (time is essential for friendship building) and encourage either joint work or deeper sharing and conversation, so that friendships can form. And this base will mean that when established people find themselves with a friendship gap (see below), the “newcomer” who is now not so new can form a deeper friendship. If homegroups are genuinely mixed (rather than all newcomers being put in a new homegroup) then they are a great way to do this. Ministry teams can also do this if they are places of joint working, prayer and training and not simply filling rotas. Prayer triplets can be another way to do this.
Second, we can set realistic expectations. It usually takes a year or two for people to form deep friendships. People who move to a new church will feel less connected than they did at their old church, and sometimes lonely. Knowing it is normal to feel like this for a while helps people not to feel like failures.
Third, we can be aware of newcomers and other people who are transitioning life stage. Whenever people transition a life stage (e.g. leave school, get married, move, change jobs, have kids, kids go to school, kids go to secondary school, kids leave home, injury or disability or divorce, bereavement), they often lose some friends from the previous life stage and have some gaps in their friendship grid. Helping people who are both looking for friendship to find each other will be helpful. Some of this happens naturally- new mums find each other! But others may need a bit more help.
Fourth, long term church members should particularly look out for people who are new to church to invite for meals, perhaps inviting more than one family around so more links can be made.
For newcomers, there is a responsibility to invest time in building relationships if you want to have friendships longer term. Occasionally I’ve heard people who dash off straight after the service and don’t attend homegroup calling the church unfriendly. That’s obviously unfair. Newcomers to church could deliberately aim to stay for post church coffee, invite people around for coffee or lunch so they get to know people, and attend extra events. They also need to be realistic about it taking time to build deep friendships, so that feeling on the fringe after a month doesn’t lead to a judgement of the church being “unfriendly”.
Sadly, some people who have never had deep friendships undermine any chance of building such friendships, by flitting from place to place, and by not investing the time to build relationships. Equally, it is possible a church may be unfriendly, either because no one has deep friendships, or because the friendship groups are closed cliques. And I don’t know how long people should stick it out before concluding this is not a church which will provide friendship. The time limit will be a wisdom call.
The challenge of people filling out their relational capacity, and so not being able to offer friendship, even while they can still be friendly, is a real one. We are finite creatures, and no-one can be true friends with everyone. Only God has infinite relational capacity and can offer everyone who comes to him perfect friendship. Only God does not have to choose between competing demands, and so is always available to listen and spend time with us.
Jots and Scribbles 