On September 20, 2026, Collective Church in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, will officially open its doors to the community. The Association of Related Churches (ARC) has been working with lead pastors Andrew and Nicole Atkinson to help them bring their dream into fruition, and one goal that kept standing out was their desire for people to experience true, genuine, and authentic community through Collective Church. Their goal stems from their local church giving them a place to belong and experience life in community.
Now, more than ever, it’s important for each of us to find a place where we truly belong. Our world may be digitally connected, but we’re drifting away from each other when it comes to our physical, face-to-face interactions, and we need to work on changing that.
What Does it Mean to “Belong”?
Belonging is the feeling that you are accepted, valued, and connected to other people or a community.
Many of us may recognize it first as being included, where people look at you in the group when they talk, even if you’ve just joined the conversation, when someone asks your opinion on something, or when they invite you to join something they’re doing. However, as ARC, churches, and pastors explain it, feeling included is just one part of belonging.
The next part is feeling like people truly know you and see you. You feel like your presence matters and that it contributes to a purpose. You have both a relationship with others, and you feel like you have a place and purpose within the group.
Why is Belonging Important to Us as Humans?
Humans are inherently social. For as long as we’ve been around, the relationships we’ve built and our place within a tribe or group have helped us find safety, share resources, raise our families, and accomplish things that we would never have been able to do on our own.
Belonging also matters psychologically. Strong social connections are associated with better well-being. On the other hand, being socially isolated has been shown to be associated with poorer mental health.
Belonging can also provide:
- Emotional support during difficult periods
- A sense of identity and purpose
- Opportunities to give and receive help
- People with whom to share important experiences
- Greater connection to the wider community
How Humans Lack Belonging Right Now
At the risk of romanticizing the past, it’s important to make it clear that humans have always experienced loneliness in some way. However, the social environment in which we try to find that belonging has changed.
For much of human history, people lived in small, interconnected communities. Family, work, religion, neighborhood life, and social relationships would overlap. You lived near your family, knew your neighbors, and worked alongside people you knew personally. That created repeated interaction, which makes relationships easier to establish. In the past, people didn’t have to go out there and deliberately search for a community, which made forming relationships easier.
Now, we have more freedom to choose our communities and find people who share our interests, experiences, or identities, but all that choice makes commitment and effort from everyone flimsy. And many of the institutions that once created automatic, repeated social interaction have weakened or changed.
Places Where Belonging Thrives
The church is one of the few places where belonging still thrives. It’s the place where you put your phone away for a few hours, sit with people who share the same faith and a similar purpose as you. A place where you can learn from others with experience, and connect with those on a similar path to yours.
The church focuses on face-to-face interactions, and so meeting for coffee, conversation, and prayer is seen as part of your life routine, rather than a chore or extra effort that you have to do to fulfill a commitment. It’s where you see your friends and support system, and where you can be a friend and support system to others.
The Future of Belonging
It may seem like we’re continuing to lose belonging, but the good news is that the tide is turning. The record number of churches launched through ARC’s network, the record number of attendees in these churches, and the impact of finding a church and a community within it show that people not only know what they need, they also know where to get it, and as Pastors Andrew and Nicole Atkinson have shown, many others want to share and pay forward the benefits they got.
About the Association of Related Churches (ARC)
The Association of Related Churches (ARC) is a church-planting organization dedicated to helping leaders launch and grow healthy, life-giving churches. Through church planter training, leadership development, coaching, and practical ministry resources, ARC has helped launch more than 1,200 churches while equipping pastors to build sustainable churches that make a lasting impact in their communities around the world.