Presence, the Antidote to Anxiety

Why Gen Z needs house church

Photo by Jack Sharp on Unsplash

There’s nothing glamorous about house church—at least, not if it’s done right. Every week that my house church gathers I anticipate at least one slightly awkward interaction. Our worship times can be clunky, the transitions hardly ever go smoothly, and everyone who is invested has strong and sometimes differing opinions that we have to navigate. I'm often quick to warn potential visitors that with house church you can't really just sit in the back and slip in and out. They'll likely end up meeting everyone who comes. House church is demanding.

But that is exactly why I think of it as necessary, especially for my generation.

Gen Z is what Jonathan Haidt calls “The Anxious Generation.”^[1] So much of my generation’s anxiety is a consequence of the interconnectivity and transient nature of our lives in a digital world. Thanks to the internet, we are bombarded with far more information than we know what to do with. Thanks to our cars, trains, and planes, we can travel long distances easily and quickly thus deteriorating any attachment to a place and local community. Thanks to our cameras, we no longer have the need to live in time because we can relive any moment at any time. Thanks to our communication technologies, we are granted the illusion of relationship without real, embodied connection that is necessary for fulfilling relationships.

The Scriptures say, “It is not good for man to be alone” (Gen 2:18). But neither, I would argue, is it good for man to be connected to too many people, too many places, too much information, too many moments in time all at once. A generation that seeks to extend their presence into all the world through technology quickly loses their ability to be present anywhere at all. My generation is so prone to anxiety because we were not created to hold all that the world contains on our own. We are not gods and all our efforts to operate as gods—with a sense of omnipresence and omniscience—have rendered us anxious, depressed, and lonely.

In a digital age, large churches are especially vulnerable to the hubristic temptation to equate scale with success. While these groups likely have more to offer in terms of resources and opportunities, the bigger they get, the more they are forced to rely on technology to create and sustain their unity. The more they rely on these technologies, the more impersonal they get. It thus becomes easier for people to pass in and out unnoticed. Furthermore, these technology-dependent services fail to offer people what I believe is most essential in a digital age: embodied love.

I like how one pastor characterized the Asbury Outpouring, the 2023 revival that took place at my alma-mater, as a special revelation of God’s presence for an anxious generation. God showed up in Wilmore, not with a resounding and extraordinary spectacle of power, but rather with a gentle, quiet demonstration of his presence. That is exactly what my fear-stricken generation needed: overwhelmed by the weight of the world, we were reminded that our Father is closer than we know.

Presence is, in many ways, the antidote to our anxieties—presence in the moment, to the places where we live, with one another and with God. “[D]o not worry about tomorrow,” Jesus taught us, “for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own” (Matt 6:34). In a digital age, the church must do everything it can to reprioritize the presence of God. Indeed, what if the path for the church in the digital age does not involve growth according to a worldly understanding of it—greater numbers, bigger buildings, more money—but is instead what Henri Nouwen calls the path of “downward mobility,”^[2] which involves stripping ourselves of our titles, tools, and platforms that so easily separate us from the least of these?

These days I see great potential in house church because as vulnerable, messy, and awkward as it can sometimes be, house church provides anxious people with the opportunity to encounter the presence of Christ through the body of Christ. I am not saying that we should look to dismantle large churches, but I do think large churches need to be willing to ask difficult questions about their use of technology, the ways they engage the practice of communion, and how they might prioritize the presence of Christ in their gatherings. That is why we gather after all, isn’t it—like the Apostles after the crucifixion in the upper room, waiting to meet with our risen Lord?

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^[1] More churches need to be talking about Haidt’s book, The Anxious Generation.

^[2] I first encountered this concept reading In the Name of Jesus by Nouwen.