Before you read another word of this email, I have a quick challenge for you. 

I want you to close out of this screen for just a second. Go open your phone’s contacts, scroll through your recent text threads, or glance at your social media followers. Take ten seconds to just look at the sheer number of names, and then come back. 

Okay, welcome back. 

If you are like most people, you just scrolled past hundreds….maybe thousands…of connections. You can instantly see what your high school lab partner ate for dinner or watch a real-time update of a co-worker’s vacation. We are statistically the most “connected” humans to ever walk the earth. 

But let me ask you a question. If the bottom completely dropped out of your life at 2:00p on a Tuesday…if you got the phone call that changed everything, or the anxiety got so loud you couldn’t breathe….how many of those hundreds of connections could you actually call? Two? Three? Any? 

That vast, quiet distance between being highly connected and being deeply known is the great paradox of our time. 

And it is the exact paradox the elementary kids in our rooms are currently drowning in. 

We are leading Generation Alpha. By the time they hit our 4th and 5th-grade circles, they have already mastered digital collaboration. They are building entire worlds on Minecraft or Roblox with kids in different time zones. They have iPads in their classrooms and smartphones in their pockets. 

But here is the terrifying data: Research is already showing that Gen Alpha is tracking to be the most isolated, lonely generation in modern history. The United States Surgeon General recently issued an advisory on the epidemic of loneliness, and it is hitting our youth the hardest. They are experiencing what sociologists call “crowded isolation.” They have endless digital networks, group chats, and virtual avatars, but very little actual, messy, face-to-face community. 

They are carrying the heavy, unfiltered weight of the world, and many of them feel completely alone while staring at a screen. 

If we want these kids to build a faith that survives long after they leave our ministry, they have to learn that following Jesus was never meant to be a solo endeavor. 

But remember what we talked about last week: They can’t catch what we don’t have. You cannot export a community you do not possess. 

That brings us to the first sub-principle of Making It Personal: Live in Community. 

It is incredibly easy for us to treat Sunday mornings like a solo performance. We walk in, rally the room, execute the lesson, and pour all our energy out to galvanize these kids. But if you are constantly pouring out without having a trusted circle behind the scenes filling you back up, you will eventually run completely dry. 

You need people in your corner. Think about your own journey….an authentic faith is sustained by the people around you. 

• You need a close friend who has stood by you through major life milestones like a brother or sister. 

• You need a mentor who poured into you when you were younger and still speaks truth into your life today. 

• You need a co-leader who knows what you are genuinely struggling with right now. 

Living in community means taking the cape off. It means refusing to do faith, or ministry, in isolation. Because when your kids see that you rely on a community, they start to believe that maybe they can find one, too. 

As you head into your week, I want you to sit with this tension: 

If the kids in your circle patterned their future friendships entirely off of the way you prioritize community in your own life right now…would they end up deeply known and supported, or would they end up exhausted and isolated? 

Think about that. Because who you surround yourself with changes everything.