You Can't Church Alone...Or Something Like That
Finding Jesus in Organic, Everyday Community
Dear Reader,
I’ve been seeing a lot on Notes of people struggling to find a church home, church hopping for over a year, feeling guilty about writing about spiritual things while not “in fellowship” anywhere in particular, and also some who have found peace in disconnection from organised expressions of Christianity. So I thought I would take a pastoral moment to address some of these concerns and frankly some of the panic shopping that happens after finding yourself spiritually displaced. I found that I had a lot to say, maybe too much and so I’ve broken it up into several essays which will release on a weekly basis on Thursdays as usual. I hope this helps.
—Daniel
You Can’t Church Alone…Or Something Like That
Finding Jesus in Organic, Everyday Community
by Daniel L. Bacon
“You can’t church alone.” Well, that’s what they say anyway—usually with the best of intentions, sometimes with a hint of institutional anxiety. But the phrase too often becomes a net, catching people in a false binary: either plug into the weekly program or risk spiritual drift. Ultimately it misses something essential; community isn’t the brainchild of a Church business meeting. It’s not the exclusive product of Sunday gatherings or small groups. It’s not an App and can’t be accessed through a login or sustained by a leadership team.
We’ve been told to find a good church. To plug in. To commit. To “Stop dating the church,” as that old defunct Joshua Harris book touted—as if our trouble was a lack of loyalty. But, it turns out, our trouble was that we confused Jesus with an organization. We went looking for a church and forgot we were already in one.
This essay isn’t a call to quit faith or float aimlessly. It’s an invitation to stop panic shopping for spiritual belonging, as if the next membership class or mission statement will give you what your soul longs for. As if Jesus is better found in a bulletin than in the barista who remembers your order, even if they can’t quite get your name right.
The Church is not the internet. You don’t need a service provider. The fullness of God is not tucked away in a doctrinal document or behind the polished veneer of a well-oiled ministry machine.
Maybe it is time to stop dating the church and break up with it already! Not with the people. Not with the love. But with the machinery. With the pressure to find the one—the perfect church that has everything you think you need. Because here's the truth: everything you need for life and godliness isn’t found in a statement of faith. It’s found in knowing God. And God is not far off.
Books like Stop Dating the Church meant well—but they assumed the “church” in question was always a formal organization served soft to us as the family of God. That assumption has aged poorly. Many who committed in good faith to people found themselves burned out, disillusioned, or invisible to an organisation.
Maybe that’s you.
By leaving the institutional church, you are not failing. You’re waking up. And you don’t need to start over with a new building. You need to recognize the life already growing around you. The Church is not something you join. It’s something you recognize.
When we step out of the organization, we find out what was real all along. Presence. Conversation. Compassion. The things that don’t scale well but matter most.
Programs can be scaffolding. But presence builds the house.
And let’s be honest: leaving one organizational expression only to form or join another isn’t progress if we’re still propping up performance. If our community isn’t rooted in presence but in pretence, we haven’t found Jesus yet—we’ve just swapped scripts.
Everything we love about Church—belonging, encouragement, correction, celebration, grace—all of that is relational and reproducible by you. It doesn’t require a 501(c)(3). It doesn’t need fog machines or mission statements. It lives wherever people love each other well. It exists wherever real people risk showing up to one another. It’s already happening in kitchens and text threads and tearful car rides. And everything we tend to hate about Church—performance, distance, bureaucracy—becomes most visible when we step out into real life, because real life resists artifice.
“Doing life in community” doesn’t require a building or a brand. Jesus didn’t wait in the temple for people to find Him. He walked dusty roads. He sat at dinner tables. He paused in crowds to notice the unnoticed. If we want to follow Him, we should start looking where He looked.
You’ve likely already met Jesus in the real world, but like the disciples on the Emmaus road, you didn’t recognise Him because he wasn’t at church on Sunday. When someone listened without rushing you, when someone showed up unasked, when love found you in a place you didn’t expect to be seen. The Spirit doesn’t wait for a microphone to move. He moves through people who show up. Sometimes it’s your family. Sometimes it’s the regular at the corner store who knows when you're not okay. The sacred slips in through the cracks of ordinary presence. The problem isn't that people are alone. It's that we've trained them to ignore the community already around them, deeming it illegitimate, and unsafe because it fails our institutional checks and as a result we have forgotten how to build community around us out of nothing but love and are therefore all the more dependent on the institutional church.
This is the strangest thing: many have already met the love of God through people in our lives—but we don’t generally recognize it as church because it doesn’t look “spiritual enough.” We’ve friend zoned Jesus. We’ve demoted holy relationships to “just friends” status because they don’t meet in a sanctuary.
The very people who quietly show up, listen deeply, pray without fanfare, or bear our burdens—these are our spiritual community. This is Christ among us. But because they weren’t part of a branded ministry, we overlooked the sacredness.
Jesus isn’t limited to a pulpit. He’s in the friend who remembers, the sibling who stays, the mentor who believes in you. Don’t miss God because He comes without a bulletin.
So, if this is you, and you’re looking for a church, take a pause.
Not because you shouldn’t find one—but because you’re already in one and not the one you think you are. I’m not being poetic. You’re already surrounded by the very thing you’re searching for: spiritual community, alive and vibrant, hidden in plain sight. Everything you need for life and godliness does not begin with a statement of faith or a polished website. It starts right where you are.
And what they say is true, “You can’t church alone.” But when this is used to pressure people into extra-biblical organizations rather than to affirm the value of connection, we’ve lost our way. Family is community. Neighbours are community. The people who show up for you and the ones you feel drawn to show up for? Community.
The problem isn’t that we’ve left the church. It’s that we’ve mistaken it for a building or an organisation and missed it where it truly exists.
The people who comfort you when you’re grieving, who drop food at your door when you're sick, who know your quirks and still call you to dinner—those people often exemplify Jesus more than the well-meaning stranger handing out communion. But we don’t see it. As I’ve said, we’ve relegated Jesus to the friend zone.
Just like Hosea’s bride running after other lovers while God quietly provides, we often ignore where Christ is most manifest: in the love and fidelity of those we overlook. We crave His presence and miss it in the places He said He’d be—among the least, the unnoticed, the faithful friends who don’t tick our "church" boxes.
It’s not that we hate God’s people; it’s that we’ve been taught to define them by membership rather than love.
Spiritual FOMO and the Myth of Missing Out
One of the biggest drivers back into organizational religion is spiritual FOMO—what if I’m missing the real thing? What if that other group has the Spirit and I’m spiritually stunted? So, we chase revivals, programs, content, personalities. But the problem isn’t always that we’re missing God—it’s that we don’t know how to recognize Him anymore when He shows up as rest, quiet, and normalcy.
The real crisis isn’t that people have left churches. It’s that people inside them often feel more disconnected from Jesus than those who left to wander.
Jesus at the Frat Party
We often go searching for Jesus in the polished places—in sermons, liturgy, group studies, and “godly” conversations—forgetting that He told us exactly where He’d be: in the thirsty, the lonely, the forgotten, the vulnerable. Not always in name, but always in need. And often, we don’t recognize Him until long after love has already acted.
These are not just good deeds; they are sacred encounters. The gospel doesn’t arrive in a fog of incense—it shows up in a breathless moment, in the choice to stay present, protect, serve, or see. Christ is there. Not in theory. In flesh and need.
Christ is the woman at the frat party who left her drink on the table for just a moment. She’s radiant, laughing, trusting the night—but someone nearby has dark intentions. You see it. You feel it. So, when she asks you to hold her drink while she steps away, you hold it with a kind of reverence, like you’re guarding something holy. You stay put; you stay sharp. You’re not thinking about Jesus—but love demands this, and you answer. She returns, unharmed, unaware—and you’ve played your part in a salvation she’ll never know she needed. That was Christ, the least of these, trusting you with her safety.
Christ is the teenage boy standing at the gas station, backpack slung low, trying to get enough signal to text someone—anyone—for a ride that isn’t coming. It’s late. The air’s cold. You see the way the clerk eyes him like a threat, the way a car circles the lot too slow. You pull over. “You good?” you ask. And when he says no with his eyes, you offer a seat, a phone, a way home. You don’t preach. You don’t even say God. But the gospel is thick in the air. You don’t rescue Him. You just sit beside Him until rescue feels possible again. That was Christ—alone, unnoticed, waiting for someone to see.
It’s not always so overt, Christ is the teenager you notice sitting alone in the school cafeteria. You choose the awkwardness of sitting down beside them over the comfort of staying with your usual crowd. Not for pity, not to make a point—but because you see them.
Christ is the neighbour whose husband yells at her in the driveway, whose kids are always a little too quiet, and whom you invite in for coffee not to rush to fix anything, but to say, "You are not alone, I’m here when you need me."
Christ is found in the margins—not just among the vulnerable, but as the vulnerable. He is the stranger, the outcast, the one without credentials, clout, or cover. And our service to Him deepens the farther we step from the curated safety of religious legitimacy into the messy, unfiltered lives of those around us. But in doing so, we begin to see ourselves among them. We’re not saviours; we are also the saved. We are the ones who will need shelter tomorrow, who will need someone to hold our drink, our hand, our dignity. The farther we walk from systems of false safety, the more we embody the reality of Christ—and in that descent, we rise with Him.
These are not sentimental examples. These are incarnational. Every one of them disrupts something—our comfort, our assumptions, our schedules—and becomes a place where Christ is both served and revealed.