Several people rightly observed that a church may make people sit together, even talk together, even eat together, even do life together, but it’s God who brings people together: through divine appointment, through the gathering of his flock, through such sacraments as birth, baptism, communion, marriage, death. To the extent that we come to rely on a church program or database to feed us friendship, we’re numbed to the more subtle, more organic relationships that God is cultivating for us.

I agree wholeheartedly that relationships aren’t a commodity to be consumed, hoarded or negotiated. Relationships are too human for that. Relationships are a trust, a covenant. To the degree that we trade in relationships we betray the gift that they are. God said it’s not good for the man to be alone, and so he introduced human community to the creation. When we find ourselves surrounded by people who are very like us, we shouldn’t be terribly surprised. But when we find ourselves entering into meaningful relationship with another person, we should marvel at the miracle. C. S. Lewis was right: demographics may be dreadfully boring, but people are marvelous.

So what do we do in place of consuming prepackaged, predictable relationships, on the one side, and enduring frustration at the seeming dearth of potential friends, on the other? And what role ought the church to play in the cultivation of real relationship?

Well, I think our challenge is train ourselves in alertness, in assertiveness, in hospitality, in hope. And I think the church—as klu pointed out, a people rather than a place—is responsible to train itself in those four things as well. I often think of the first encounter of Adam and Eve. Alertness was a stretch for both: Adam has only recently undergone rib-removal under heavy sedation, and Eve has only recently been fashioned out of the dust of the earth. Adam asserts himself by naming Eve and accepting her into the human community, which has just doubled in size. Eve, simultaneously, asserts her humanness, willingly enters into Adam’s reality and embraces God’s mandate to the human community to steward God’s creation. Without the active participation of both, there is no human community, and each is still alone, which God has already decreed is not good.

Hospitality is likewise a key ingredient of the kind of happy accident that we keep alert for and cultivate when we find it. And hospitality—the openness of one to another—is the discipline that guards us against cliquishness and homogeneity. We assume a posture of being ready to receive another, and artificial constraints against that reception—ethnicity, economics, personality type, intellect, appearance, whatever—self-evidently violate our prior commitment to being open to the other. I’d argue that manufactured gatherings, from small groups to church services themselves, have the potential to subvert this eminently Christian discipline.

And finally, hope—a resolute attempt to see beyond the immediate to the potential. Hope kept Martin Luther King talking to the White Citizens Councils in the segregated south; hope kept Paul writing letters to churches behaving badly. With hope we can take risks in relationship, risks that have often been systematically minimized and sterilized in manufactured gatherings.

Alertness, assertiveness, hospitality and hope are never necessarily our first instincts, which is why we need to train ourselves in them, and why the church would do better if it would reallocate its resources from small group database software into helping, challenging, commanding and empowering people to grow in these areas. Happy accidents are all around us because every place is a common place, because the earth was established for the people of God. And they’re all around us because all the earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof—no matter how common.

Of course, as is my custom, I’m making this all up as I go along.