There’s a startup that’ll seat you at dinner with strangers for a fee. There are apps that gamify friendship outreach, co-working memberships for people who miss having colleagues, and a sober nightlife platform in New York that’s built a community of 35,000 people by offering somewhere to go on a Friday night that isn’t a bar. Bloomberg recently noted that friendship startups are pulling serious venture capital despite a fundamental business model problem. Forbes followed with profiles of founders making real money “solving adult loneliness.” The market, they said, is enormous. Almost everyone is a customer.
What neither publication could bring itself to say is the obvious thing: this product already existed. It was called church, and for a very long time, it was free.
For most of Western history, the local congregation was what sociologist Ray Oldenburg called a “third place” — not home, not work, but the space where people gathered regularly, knew each other’s names, and built the kind of relationships that don’t require you to be in the mood. You showed up weekly. When someone’s spouse got sick, people brought food without being asked. When someone died, you stood in a room together and said words that meant it mattered. The relational infrastructure of a functioning church is, it turns out, exactly what venture-backed startups are now trying to reconstruct at $29 a dinner.
Levi Lusko, pastor of Fresh Life Church, has watched this dynamic play out in real time. “You can be surrounded by people and still feel like you’re drowning,” Lusko said. “Loneliness doesn’t always mean you’re isolated. Sometimes it means you’re disconnected from something deeper. Something eternal.”
The founders building these businesses aren’t villains. Matic Jesenovec noticed people were lonely and started selling tickets to dinners with strangers — guests kept coming back week after week and leaving as friends. Lyndsey Clay went through infertility and divorce in her 40s, described herself as “socially stranded,” said so publicly, and watched thousands respond with me too before turning the whole thing into a social club. These are genuinely good instincts aimed at a genuinely real problem. The fact that they’re building businesses around it is less an indictment of the founders than a diagnosis of what we gave up.
Bloomberg’s right that the business model is broken. Intimacy doesn’t scale because intimacy isn’t a product — it’s a byproduct of commitment, of showing up when you don’t feel like it, of staying through boring seasons and hard ones. The startups can build the room. They can’t build the staying. Susan Mettes, a behavioral scientist whose book The Loneliness Epidemic draws on Barna Group data, said technology runs into a hard limit here.
“It doesn’t give us that emotional intimacy, or the trust, or the other things that really help us create the relationships that fight against loneliness,” Mettes said.
What’s striking is how often the founders themselves describe what they’re selling in terms that sound almost liturgical — “a reliable reason to show up,” “a room that makes the rest easy,” a forest that holds where a single tree in a storm does not. The language keeps reaching for something the market can’t quite name: belonging that doesn’t have a cancellation policy.
None of this means the church has a monopoly on human community, or that leaving it broke everything. The institution has its own serious accounting to do, and plenty of people who were hurt by churches or never found real belonging in one are lonely for reasons that have nothing to do with Sunday attendance. The loneliness epidemic — and it is, at this point, accurately an epidemic; the U.S. Surgeon General declared it a public health crisis — isn’t primarily a market failure. It’s a commitment failure. It’s what happens when a culture dismantles the structures that required people to show up for each other and then discovers, a generation later, that people aren’t showing up for each other.
And the church’s record on this isn’t clean. Mettes’ research found a complicated picture inside congregations.
“Some people are coming to church lonely and becoming less lonely,” she said. “Some people are becoming lonely on leaving church, some people are becoming lonely within the church, some people are staying lonely within the church.”
For Christians sitting inside the thing the market is now trying to reconstruct, this moment is worth more than a shrug. The loneliness economy isn’t a threat to the church — it’s a mirror. The culture is confirming, in the most secular possible language, that what a congregation offers is something humans can’t live well without. Lusko has called the church the place “where solitary people can be set into families,” and said that’s “the paradigm-shattering power of what it can be.” The operative word is can.
The question for any church watching friendship apps pull venture funding isn’t how do we compete. It’s are we actually doing the thing. Do people here know each other’s names? Is this a place where someone in trouble would know who to call? Mettes frames the obligation practically.
“It’s time the church took ministry for mental health, including loneliness, more seriously,” she said. “Churches should spend at least the amount of energy to address loneliness as they do to get meals to new parents.”
The loneliness economy is booming because the church left a vacancy. The hopeful read on that isn’t that churches should start charging for what they’ve been giving away — it’s that what they’ve been giving away still matters enough that the world’s paying for a pale imitation of it, which means the real thing is still worth offering.
You can subscribe to friendship now. Or you could also just go to church.
