The Life-Changing Power of Small Groups
On this week’s Good Faith podcast, co-hosts David French and Curtis Chang interviewed Jonathan Tjarks, a sportswriter who published a profoundly moving essay in The Ringer earlier this month reflecting on his terminal cancer diagnosis.
It’s a gripping story, and if you have the time, please read the article or listen to the podcast. It’ll be far better than anything I could ever write. In fact, I’m going to focus on the more mundane parts of the article, his lessons on church small group communities — of all things! — that are applicable in the regular, day-to-day life that most of us experience.
So let’s begin with the moment in the article when he shares his own experience, pre-cancer, encountering life groups.
I was nervous the first time I went to a life group. I’d joined a church the week before and one of the pastors, a guy a few years older than me, invited me. It was a smaller group of people who met at his house every week.
I remember walking up to the door and not knowing what to expect on the other side. There were about a dozen people in the living room talking to each other. I didn’t know any of them besides the pastor—and I barely knew him. I didn’t know what to do, so I did what most people would do: I headed over to the table with snacks.
Eventually the chatter died down and everyone sat in a circle in the living room. They all introduced themselves with an icebreaker. Something about their favorite TV show or their favorite snack. I was thinking, either I’m supposed to say I’m an alcoholic or this is a cult.
But nothing that exciting happened. They sang a few songs and then talked about the Bible for a while. At the end of the meeting, everyone paired off to pray for each other and the pastor asked me what I thought of the group. Then he asked if I would come back. I said I guess, but I wasn’t sure.
That was seven years ago. Some of those strangers from the house that first night are now some of my closest friends. It didn’t happen overnight. It took me a long time to feel comfortable. I usually came after the life group had already started and left as soon as it was over.
But I was seeing the same people every week and I was telling them about my problems and they were telling me about theirs. Do that for long enough and you become friends. You get to know enough people that way and life group goes from being an obligation to something you look forward to.
Making the commitment to come every week is still hard. There are always other things to do. Sometimes you are tired or you had a long day or you just don’t feel like it. It gets even harder once you get married and have kids.
Nor are the people always easy to deal with. You may not have a lot in common. You have to search for things to talk about. You can be vulnerable with people and they don’t always respond how you would expect. And you certainly won’t always agree with them on how they see the world.
The past two years haven’t been easy. Our life group met over Zoom for a while. People ask me whether I have to be more careful because of my condition and the pandemic. But it’s really the opposite. I don’t have the luxury of waiting for life to get back to normal. This might be the only time that I have.
I can’t imagine not being in a life group at this point. Human beings aren’t supposed to go through life as faces in a crowd. It’s like the song from Cheers. Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name.
And in the podcast, Tjarks goes into more detail on how life groups transformed his impression of what church was really about:
I remember joining a church and it didn’t seem that interesting — I’d go on Sunday and hear a sermon, and is that it? What really changed my life was going to life group. Every week we meet in someone’s house. It’s only like 12-15 people, so that after a long enough period of time, you really get to know people on a very personal level.
It was so life-changing for me, especially working in the media, where you’re all working remotely. You mostly know people through work or your friends from college, but I didn’t feel like I had a ton of people in my life investing in me on a weekly basis. Going out and getting drinks is great, but it’s not the same as saying, “I’m going to pray for you every week.”
As time went on, I realized that this was really meaningful, that I have a lot of friends now. Now I see the point of going to church — I’m going to see my friends. And that was the part that, not growing up in the church, I never understood. You’d go to church on Sundays and a guy would talk for a while, and it seemed kind of pointless — I just thought I’d rather sleep in and watch football.
But now, going to church means seeing my friends, hanging out and going out for lunch after. That’s been the big change for me — I have these people in my life. No matter where I go in the world, no matter what happens to me, I can always plug into a life group at a certain kind of church and just keep moving. And now, obviously, being sick, that’s been magnified tenfold.
So much of this matches and resonates with my experience, down to the icebreaker introduction. Some of that is no coincidence — like me when I first came to Boston, Tjarks attends at a church that’s part of the Acts 29 church planting network. We called our groups “community groups” rather than “life groups,” but the structure was basically the same. And their importance was made incredibly clear: As the pastors frequently repeated, collective weekly attendance at community groups was even higher than that on the Sunday morning gatherings.
I remember the first time it struck me that this type of community was available to me basically anywhere I would live. I was spending the summer of 2013 in Duluth, Minnesota helping to run an undergrad math research program. Since I only had access to a car on the weekends, I found an Acts 29 church that met nearby and plugged into a small group that met afterwards on Sundays. They called them “missional communities” or but they were also basically the same.
As it turns out, many of the members of that small group were the folks who drove in from the exurbs to attend this church because they believed in its mission. One couple came in a full-size van with the subset of their 12 homeschooled children who still lived at home. Needless to say, this was a different slice of life than Boston! But the community in that group was still rich and meaningful. I’m actually still friends with that couple on Facebook, and I was able to meet up with them again when I visited the program the following year.
I love my church’s service here in Singapore, but the highlight of my Sunday is always lunch afterwards with our community group. When COVID restrictions limited group sizes to two during the Delta wave, we didn’t even bother to go in person, and just watched the livestream from home. Brief greetings in passing just weren’t worth the commute. And like Tjarks, we’ve had to deal with our fair share of Zoom CG over the pandemic, which is just never the same. But we’re happily back in person now and just itching to all get together in one location again once the Omicron wave subsides and the five-home-visitor restriction lifts.
If there’s been any cracks in that community, they’re the same ones that Tjarks identifies in the podcast:
The last two years have been a struggle, but it’s been less about COVID. For me and my friends, we’re all in our early 30’s, and everyone’s having kids. And that’s really been the bigger crucible: When you have a kid, are you still going to invest in life group, still get plugged in? Because there are more and more responsibilities, and it becomes more and more difficult.
We too have about 15-20 regulars in our CG, but the WhatsApp group has about twice that many people on it. When I’ve asked the veterans who these other folks are, the theme is consistent: They used to attend regularly, but then they had a kid.
Lately we’ve been trying to figure out how to keep those families more integrated into our CG. Some of that is pretty simple, like limiting our lunch outings to nearby locations so the kids can walk there with us. But it’s also involved having them over and playing with their kids on the playground and in each of our apartments, giving their parents a brief but welcome break.
I’m convinced that you really need that second weekly interaction, which for us is lunch after church. CG is great, but it’s not always enough to form deep bonds. As one of the veterans shared with us recently, our CG hasn’t always gotten lunch after church together, and perhaps part of the reason those couples previously a part of the CG dropped off is because they weren’t as close back then. With two couples pregnant with their first child, we’re hopeful that we can build strong enough bonds with them now to maintain those relationships through that transition.
How does this relate to his cancer diagnosis? Tjarks recounts his own experience coping with a dying father, as his got Parkinson’s when he was 12 and died nine years later.
Everyone was supportive at first. They brought us food, drove him places, and got him in and out of the car. But those visits slowly dried up over time. My dad kept getting sicker and could no longer do the things that had made them friends in the first place. People moved, or had kids, or got busy at work. Even the Christmas cards stopped coming. By the end, the only people who stopped by the house were nurses and health care workers.
My dad died when I was 21. There were a bunch of people at his funeral whom I hadn’t seen in years. They all told me how sorry they were and asked whether there was anything they could do. All I could think was I don’t know any of you. I know of you. I’ve heard your names. But I don’t know you.
The lie that society tells us is that our friends can be our family. That’s the premise of TV shows like Friends, Seinfeld, and How I Met Your Mother. We can all leave our hometowns behind and have exciting adventures in the big city with people that we meet. And those people will love us and take care of us and be there for us.
But life is more like what happened to the actual actors on Friends. Their TV reunion was the first time all six had been together in years. They still cared about each other to a degree, but they had grown apart. They were living in different cities and working different jobs and had a million different things happen to them that they didn’t share as a group. It couldn’t be the same as it was when they were all single and working on the same TV set.
Americans tend to put our careers first and move around the country. That’s what my parents did. My dad was from Nebraska. My mom is from the Philippines. I grew up in Dallas. That’s a long way from their families (although one of my mom’s sisters ended up moving here). My parents tried to form a community where they lived, but they didn’t really have one. Not one that lasted.
There’s a straightforward question that should linger in everyone’s mind when he turns to introducing us to life groups, and the bonds that he’s formed through those. What makes him think that they’ll be any different from his father’s friends?
At the end of the article, he answers this question, and it really turns the screws:
There are some things from the Bible that I have been leaning on over the past year:
“Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this. To look after orphans and widows in their distress.” —James 1:27
“Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless; plead the case of the widow.” —Isaiah 1:17
“You shall not mistreat any widow or fatherless child.” —Exodus 22:22
There are hundreds of verses like that. I have already told some of my friends: When I see you in heaven, there’s only one thing I’m going to ask—Were you good to my son and my wife? Were you there for them? Does my son know you?
I don’t want Jackson to have the same childhood that I did. I want him to wonder why his dad’s friends always come over and shoot hoops with him. Why they always invite him to their houses. Why there are so many of them at his games. I hope that he gets sick of them.
One thing I have learned from this experience is that you can’t worry about things that you can’t control. I can’t control what will happen to me. I don’t know how long I will be there for my son. All I can do is make the most of the time that I have left. That means investing in other people so they can be there for him.
I don’t cry much, but I teared up reading that. Yes, caring for widows and fatherless children is ALL OVER Scripture. And a pattern of actually doing that has been with the church since the very beginning as recorded in the book of Acts. The very role of deacon was first established to serve the very real needs of the widows in the community.
But it’s also really hard. The little that we can do for the intact families in our community group pales in comparison with this level of support.
We all have friends we’ve lost touch with as we’ve moved around. It’s way too high of a burden to imagine that we should try to maintain those friendships forever. Some of the closest ones we will, yes. But what’s really needed is the ability to form new friendships wherever we go.
Tjarks’ current CG friends might not remain in Dallas forever. But some of them will, and others will move to the area and meet his widow and son. And they’ll also be part of that community enveloping the family.
To the Christians reading this far, I’d really encourage you to invest in a small group community wherever you live. And to the curious non-Christians out there, if you find yourself in similar position, craving that sort of deep community, try it out!
For all of us, let’s work to build deeper connections together. Facebook is not enough; drinks after work don’t cut it. Even hobbies we share can be too little, as our interests or abilities change as Tjarks’ father’s did. Wherever you can, seek out “thick communities,” as I wrote about in a blog post five years ago: