Day 2: The Crisis of Meaning and Belonging
This is Day 2 of my exercise of working in public. I’m talking about Lifefulness — the practice of building secular, inclusive and evidence based congregational communities.
The aim is to spread the word, to find collaborators and to build the field of Lifefulness. If it rings your bell then join up to this FB group Lifefulness.
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It was the end of July, London was sweltering, and as I rode my bike up through Oval I went past a church that had a street light on in the middle of one of the hottest days of the year.
The sight made me pull over, take a picture, then spend 10 minutes (let’s face it, it was more like 20) at work choosing a filter, putting some squares around the light and adding a quote.

Why did I do that?
Because “Do we not need to light lanterns in morning?” are words uttered by the eponymous hero of Nietzche’s “Parable of the Mad Man”.
And there was a church with lanterns lit in the morning.
The mad man in the parable utters the immortal line: “ God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.” This person experiencing mental ill health (as he would be called today) is running around his town screaming because he can’t imagine a world without God, without the lodestar that has guided his civilisation, but that is the world that came about in the West.
The end of religion as a primary moral force is but one of the contributing factors to the 21st century’s crisis of meaning and belonging. (Oh, and at this point it is worth me adding that I am a card carrying member of the British Humanist Association and atheist to my bones — just so we’re clear).
A crisis that cannot be ignored because us humans, we are a meaning making, social primate.
Without an understanding of why we are alive on this planet, and a group of people to live our lives with, we are lost.
The decline of religion is not the only cause of this (urbanisation, increased mobility, longer working hours, solitary working conditions, the rise of social media, the decline of grand narratives, reduced pub visits, reduced participation in civil society and more all play their part) but the congregational community is a proven way of meeting our need for meaning and belonging.
Turning on Twitter can make it seem that the world is suffering from a million problems — polarisation, consumerism, rising nationalism, divided politics, ecological armageddon, social isolation, racial injustice, crumbling mental health, rampant consumerism, untrammelled narcissism and the like — but these are the symptoms of a far deeper, infrastructural weakness: the collapse of shared systems of meaning and structures of belonging.
Tackling these issues will require a huge amount of work, on many fronts.
Typically the solutions will need to considered, painstaking and slow, while the problems seem to scalable, rapid and breathless.
Lifefulness is not the answer but it can be a part of us building a world where people feel they are living lives of purpose, embedded in loving, caring communities.
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Day 2 — lesson. Feels good to get this stuff out there and show a paper trail for what I’m doing.
It will also take more time than I thought. But that’s alright.
Remember there is an FB group called Lifefulness that you can join.
