Giving a new congregation a try

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Hi:
I am in the process of trying out a new congregation this weekend and while I am excited I do realize that a lot of them have cliques who like to stick together. I find when I attend a new congregation that I like I don't pay attention to the cliquishness. It's when I try to get involved that I run into it.

On top of that I do get very hyper sensitive at times when I get frustrated with out people. I do know that I will have problems unless I fix them.

What are the best ways to navigate around?

I ignore cliques and sort of float between them all. I have never been in a clique. You get them in all walks of life, school, college, workplaces, clubs, churches. It's just people who have things in common getting on well with each other. I've foudn it tends to be women who grew up in the same area and who are all married and have kids now and the ones like me, well travelled and who have a career are the outsiders.

I find that I can be friendly with everyone on a superficial level a hey how are you doing sort of thing and move on to the next person and say, hi how are you, but my closest friends are the other loners. I've moved around a bit so have been to a few different churches and have kept in touch with the one or two people I met there that I got along with. So I have a group of friends, but we are spread out across the country and we get together every-so-often. This is what has worked for me. I gave up on the idea of having conventional relationships a long time ago. I just don't fit in with cliques at all, so i stopped trying.

Hopefully you'll meet someone you click with. I don't know if you would want to go down my route of visiting lots of different churches and meeting one or two people and keeping them as friends regardless of where I went next, you many want to only go to one church, but the moving around has helped me meet different people.

I did make some connections at my current congregation which I really grew to like and trust. We weren't really that close though. I do wish to stay in touch though. I also had gone to this one for about 4 years as well and I would try to get involved but that just never appeared to work out. Moreover I feel that the congregation is just too big while the leader is very well known and highly reputable so I never got a chance to ever connect you know.

Oh I know what you mean about the size of a congregation making a difference. I feel like if there are too many people attending you can get lost in the crowd and it's more difficult to make connections. When I was in a small town in a church with only 40 attending each week I felt more like I was part of a family and you would notice if someone wasn't there, but the larger the number, the easier it is to feel lost.

I saw a documetary on tv about social groups and one section looked at the Amish. When their community gets too big they split down the middle and form a new community. They try and keep to only about 100 people in each community. Apparently humans function better in social groups of 100 or less and the narrator thought it was interesting that the Amish have adopted that system.

I second the smaller congregation thing.

I gave the new congregation a try yesterday and so far it appears to a better fit but that was just the first day. I had the same thing happen at the last one where I was really happy for a while. It was in 2013 that I started leaving with an empty feeling just about every time I left. Then I kept running into people who I got along with that would come and go.

What I enjoy most about this congregation is that I have a connection from the last one that I attended who I have always gotten along with.