In my professional life, I work with leaders in tech, finance, government, and social change organizations to create meaningful change. Drawing partly from spiritual traditions, I help these leaders understand how they can build loyalty, strengthen identity, and live out shared values. When leaders create a robust and committed community, they build relationships that are effective and resilient. These relationships in turn can lead to profound change. This book is an extension of that work. It’s primarily (but not exclusively) intended for those brave people who seek to bring others together to create something enriching, satisfying, and meaningful. Sometimes that something is a community that can shift the future of our planet. But let’s put that aside for the moment.
It’s only because I felt like an outsider for so long that I was able to write this book about community building and belonging. When I say, “outsider,” I mean someone who wonders “will I ever have the friends I want” and “is there anywhere I’ll ever fit in.” I’ve felt so lonely that I’ve cried alone at night. In my early twenties, I accompanied my cousin Erin to her large, young, and hip church in Los Angeles because I was searching for a spiritual community. The service began with a downbeat from the contemporary praise band. In that moment, seemingly everyone, well over a thousand people in the auditorium, stood and raised their hands in the air and began swaying with the music. Halfway through that service, I no longer wanted to pretend that I was comfortable. I preferred something far more contemplative. Quietly, I sat down.
I still remember the looks and frowns directed at me sitting alone. It was clear that I didn’t belong. Over the years, I have sought out many groups, looking for the right one, the one to which I would belong.
When I was twenty-five, I served in the US Peace Corps in northern Zambia, near the Congo–Zaire border. When I left home, I looked forward to meeting people as brave and adventurous as I wanted to be. The villagers welcomed me generously, but I felt lonely many nights, in a strange place with a different language and different food. Not fitting in, in that environment, was not a surprise. But I also remember the nights I sat around fire pits with other volunteers. Often there were tall stacks of beer crates nearby. In the background, a never-ending series of drinking games went on. One night, a Peace Corps volunteer I’ll call Ralph turned to me and said, “I don’t trust people who don’t get drunk.” Because I didn’t drink alcohol, well, he didn’t trust me.
From that conversation and several similar evenings, I understood that I didn’t really fit in among those volunteers either.
After the Peace Corps I moved to New York City, still hoping to find the group to which I would belong. A pastor on Manhattan’s East Side introduced me to wisdom from C. S. Lewis’s lecture “The Inner Ring.”1 Lewis wrote that we all want to enter inner rings of exclusivity. These are groups that are more exclusive and cooler than the groups to which we already belong. The problem lies not in the rings themselves but in our desire and longing to get inside them. This desire drives good people to do very bad things. It’s the unrecognized cause of a lot of unhappiness. Lewis further explains that, unfortunately, when we do get inside these exclusive rings, we always discover that there’s an even more attractive and exclusive ring beyond. This pattern will continue forever unless we break it. This is the trap of the inner ring.
Lewis’s solution was to find something we like to do and do it often. Then invite others to join us if they like doing that thing too. The people who join us will create a special type of relationship that allows us to escape the trap of the inner ring. That relationship is called friendship. I was inspired by the notion that if I could not find the right community, perhaps I could create it. At the time, I was producing, without sufficient skill or resources, what became an independent PBS documentary. I also organized other restaurant workers abused by a company that ignored labor laws. I came to understand that building community was important for success in both endeavors.
In my thirties, I went to graduate school at Yale to study religion, ethics, and philosophy. There I learned many ideas that had brought together people across the globe over millennia. I learned how Jews coalesced within a hostile empire, how Anabaptists stood up to the Roman Church at horrific cost, how Zen monastics still dissuade outsiders from joining their long-kept private rituals, how Jains maintain their radical compassion in a violent world, and how Green Nuns band together to celebrate a new theology for our relationship to earth. So many people over so many years have held together in brutal and murderous times. Often they were so successful that you can still meet their descendants today. It was inspiring to see how strong even small bands could remain, even while facing existential threat. There was so much to learn from them, lessons that applied just as easily to secular communities as to spiritual ones.
One thing that surprised me, when I arrived at Yale, was the discovery that its history and brand loomed so large that many other students, just like me, thought that they could never be good enough to truly belong there. We feared that, at any moment, someone would ask us to leave after revealing us to be the frauds we felt certain we were. There was a lot of loneliness and fear at Yale. With Lewis’s wisdom in mind, my now wife Socheata and I chose to host dinners in our home every Friday night. We would cook a large multicourse dinner and serve it to anyone who would come.
That first semester there were many times when I was sure that we had made a silly commitment. Guests would cancel at the last minute. I would cook a feast and only three people would show up. I had to turn down invitations to all the other fun stuff on Fridays on campus and in New York. Over time, things changed. With perseverance and a lot of work, the dinners became popular. But after hosting well over five hundred people in our home, we were exhausted. Rather than give up the dinners, we built a team of volunteers to plan the menus, cook the meals, and set the space. Arjan volunteered to manage the appointed dinner leaders, and Sam would go on to manage the sponsors and guest lists.
While cooking dinners, sharing those meals, and cleaning our kitchen, I formed many of my dearest friendships. Those friends have traveled with me across countries and stood with me at my wedding. On my worst days, I call them so I don’t cry alone. Sometimes, they cry in my living room. We are now to one another what my friend Nick calls “3 a.m. friends.” We know that when we call each other at 3 a.m., we’ll ask how we can help and then take action. We make one another so much stronger.
In my sixth year in New Haven, my friend Melo took me to lunch at the Yale Commons. Just the two of us sat at a long table on the north side, and he shared a special story with me. He told me that his first year at Yale had been the hardest of his life. He had come from the Philippines, and the American culture, the New England weather, and the workload were hard enough. He discovered that his medical doctor wife, Jazz, couldn’t work in Connecticut, so she had to live and work hundreds of miles away so they could make ends meet. During that first semester, his mother’s cancer worsened. He couldn’t afford a surprise trip to Manila, so when she died, he couldn’t see her, or say good-bye or “I love you” one last time. As I have done many times, he cried by himself at night. During the summer break, at home in Manila, he decided that he never wanted to return to New Haven. It didn’t matter that he had a full scholarship and was one of a few Filipinos to study at Yale. It was just too hard. He couldn’t do it.
“Then,” Melo said, “I remembered your invitations to the dinners at your house. And I knew that I belonged. I knew that I wasn’t alone, and that gave me the strength to come back.” I didn’t know that when he invited me to lunch that day, he had done so because he was graduating the next month, and he wanted me to know that I had changed his whole life. The act of creating community can look simple, even mundane. But it can also be life changing. We weren’t just making dinners. We were creating deep relationships that serve, support, and heal.
One thing I learned in my religious studies is that our experience of community has changed in a single generation. The number of people who say that they have no one to talk to about difficult subjects has tripled in the last few decades. Moreover, the size of the average person’s social network decreased by one-third in the same time.2 In fact, more people say that they don’t have a confidante than those who say that they do.3 Americans, particularly those under thirty, are not participating in formal religious organizations as much as people did even a generation ago. These religious organizations were often the basis for communities of values. According to a 2012 Pew Research report, “one-fifth of the US public—and a third of adults under 30—are religiously unaffiliated today, the highest percentages ever in Pew Research Center polling.”4 In addition, about three-quarters (74 percent) of these unaffiliated adults were raised with some affiliation, but have chosen to lapse. The statistics do not indicate that Americans think any differently about God or spirituality. On the contrary, overwhelming majorities continue to say that God and spirituality are important.5
Churches aren’t the only social institutions to erode. In the 1970s almost two-thirds of Americans attended some kind of club meeting.6 By the late 1990s nearly two-thirds had never attended a club meeting. The average American invested about a third less time in organizational life (excluding religious groups) in the thirty years from 1965 to 1995.7 Even the number of picnics per capita went down 60 percent from 1975 to 1999!8
The millennial generation may be more interested in connection and values-based activism than prior generations. They may be desperate for deeper connection, without the stale organizational baggage abandoned from a generation ago. Millennials prefer to live in dense, diverse urban villages where social interaction is closer than in isolated suburbs.9 They’re more likely to join a cause (environmental, social, economic, etc.) than a social club.10 Millennials also want to make a difference in their communities: “High school seniors today are more likely than previous generations to state that making a contribution to society is very important to them and that they want to be leaders in their communities.”11 Consistent with this, 84 percent made a donation to charity in 2014.12
We know that social relationships have profound positive effects on our physical and mental health, longevity, and happiness. Loneliness kills, and the quality of our relationships matter. The seventy-five-year Study of Adult Development indicates that good relationships keep us happier and healthier. People who are socially disconnected are less happy, experience health declines earlier, and live shorter lives than people who are not lonely. One in five Americans report that they are lonely.13 A 2010 review involving over 300,000 participants concluded that having weak social ties was as harmful to health as alcoholism! In fact, “a lack of social relationships was equivalent to smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day.”14
The research indicates that Americans today are seeking connection with others who share their values. But they’re not involved in communities that typically provide deep ongoing connection, membership, and life-honoring rituals. Best-selling author and marketing guru Seth Godin writes that people today want connection more than material things. He believes that we’re in a connection economy in which those who connect others will succeed.15
When we do find people who share at least some of our values, there’s a real opportunity for friendship. It doesn’t matter if this is at work or on our block, or while volunteering in a distant country. Building community creates a venue for friendship, and friendship defeats loneliness. In deep community we can be vulnerable and still know that we belong. Those of us who are able to connect what may be a new lonely generation will have a profound effect on the health and well-being of those we serve no matter why we bring people together. I unwittingly started this journey because I was desperate to find a community for me. I promise you that I continue because I’ve learned how important it is for us all to know that we belong. The leaders who create this, well, we will change the world. I hope this inspires you.