One of the things I absolutely love about participating in Biblios is the live experience of building community. Even Back In The Day of designing Biblios (see photo from 2017!), I was amazed to see how people are wired to form community through experiencing shared activities, joy and purpose together. I am currently hosting two courses, and each session is different, each conversation is different, each experience of learning is different. Whilst we are seeking to draw out the same truths from these ancient texts in engaging ways, we are also ‘live’ building joyful, thoughtful, brave communities.
According to the BBC’s Loneliness Experiment survey 40 percent of young people feel lonely compared to 27 per cent of over 75s. By 2025/2026, the number of over 50s experiencing loneliness will be 2 million. In the longest study on happiness in the world - the Harvard Study on Adult Development - the finding was simple: the single, greatest, most significant contributor to happiness is relationships. Consequently, a lack of deep relationships is bad for our physical health too. These health conditions are linked to chronic loneliness: cardiovascular health risks, increased blood pressure, depression, and increased risk of dementia. To misappropriate a famous lyric: loneliness is literally killing us softly.
This is not new news. We all know this. And we all agree: we are social animals and in order to thrive, we need to be in community. So why don’t we just build community? Why is it so hard for us to mitigate against this pandemic of loneliness with building community? Even acknowledging our wholly immersive, radically individualistic, consumerist, social context, why can’t we even live easily with the one person we are supposed to love the most in the world? Why is it so hard to do the first and most basic thing of being a human, relate well to another human?
And this is where my obsession with the biblical narrative comes in. Contrary to current popular opinion – we are not in fact, merely social animals, we are heaven on earth spaces, we are humans. What do I mean by that? We are mammals. Yes. We are material. Yes. We are dust. Yes.
But we are also glory: we are completely and fully and inextricably integrated spiritual material beings. We operate in the seen realm and the unseen realm, in the scientifically quantifiable realm and the prophetically discerned realm, in the natural realm and the supernatural realm. And these two realms so fully overlap in the construct that is the human being, that we cannot name where one ends and the other begins. We are spiritual. Yes.
And we are designed, in the image of God who is community, to love God and love our neighbour as ourselves. If we live fractured, atomised, radically individualistic lives then we fail to represent the One whose Trinitarian image we bear, we fail to love, we fail to be truly human, we fail to thrive, we are literally dying. The biblical narrative helps not only understand the why of our fractured, atomised, radically individualistic lives, (and – no spoiler alert - you will have to read it, ideally in community, to find out the why!) but the library of ancient scrolls also points to the Who who can heal us. The One who is heaven on earth, the One who is integrated, whole and deeply loving, the One who is true humanity.
Why Biblios? At one level, Biblios builds community – it is intentionally designed to mitigate against this pandemic of loneliness by building community. Biblios cannot be experienced alone and it cannot be experienced online. A group of people have to do the hard work of saying yes to meeting together at an agreed time and place, in order to go on the shared, joyful, disruptive adventure, which is the (re-) discovery of that ancient set of literary texts that we have come to call the Bible.
A group of people that are friends, or strangers; seekers, or finders; believers, or doubters; young, or old; curious or scared; humble or proud; open, or closed. A group of people who find that something happens to them simply because they show up, simply because they say yes, simply because they are all in: they end up happier, healthier and more alive. As I started with – there is nothing more genuinely hopeful than seeing authentic community forged before my very eyes.
Because the content Biblios connects us with is weightier than simply a shared project, interest, or hobby. After all, some degree of community can – of course - be experienced in the gym, in the pub, in singing together, in playing together. What sets Biblios apart is not Biblios. It is not even the ancient literary texts that Biblios is helping us all to re-discover. It is because Biblios facilitates, in community, the re-discovery of the texts which point to the One.
Yes, the Bible points to the One: Jesus, Yeshua, Isa. The One, who not only shows us the Way, but is the Way to healing, to community, to thriving. In His physical death and bodily resurrection from the dead in time and place, this One has already uprooted the very core, root, issue which produces the pandemic of loneliness; and has already replaced it with the building block of community, the capacity to love.