Join the Club by Tina Rosenberg

Author:Tina Rosenberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2011-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

DOUGH AND JEN YONAMINE were among the Willow Creek worshippers who found the rewards. After their discouraging experience with trying to organize neighborhood groups, they were relieved when Tim and Michele Auch, who live half a mile away, volunteered to host an experimental Table in June 2006. The Yonamines joined the Auchs’ group, as did four other Algonquin families. Their experience with trying to “do life together” tells a lot about how the social cure works. When Doug invited me (at Randy Frazee’s suggestion) to visit the group, he said it had been a struggle for people to make the time. But the members had also experienced gradual small victories: more self-awareness, a more spiritual life, and, for some, a closer relationship with God.

I met three of the six couples on a Saturday night in the spring of 2008 at Willow Creek. Part of what the group does together every week is attend services at 5:30 p.m. (Willow Creek repeats the same service twice on Sunday.) Then the group eats together in the giant food court downstairs. The Auchs, the Yonamines, and Tim and Beth Moss sat down with their trays at a table in the noisy hall; their children sat at a table of their own nearby.

Michele and Tim Auch had met at a church in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Michele had been a student at Eastern Michigan University; Tim was working at an Ann Arbor research firm and was a part-time graduate student at the University of Michigan. In that church, they were part of a small group. “Everyone lived in the same neighborhood,” said Tim, a balding man with a goatee and an acerbic intelligence. “It was intense.” Only one of the families had children, so the group met at that couple’s house. The meetings were so compelling to the members that some lasted more than three hours and people would still linger. The group also pooled resources and shared such things as lawnmowers and freezers.

Tim and Michele left college determined to move to the developing world and work with the poor, but Michele became pregnant right away, so the plan was postponed, indefinitely. Now Michele, a direct and serious woman who looks like the singer Sheryl Crow, worked part-time as an occupational therapist, and Tim was a systems architect at Motorola. They had two children.

The Auchs shared a backyard fence with Tim and Beth Moss. The two families knew each other well and had been taking care of each other’s children for ten years before the Table group was born. The Mosses, who had three children, called themselves the skeptics of the Table group, and Tim Moss was always the one with the most questions. They were both tall, big, and gregarious. Beth was a social worker at a shelter for homeless families and Tim was a paramedic.

Formally, the Table group met twice a month, for a potluck at the Auchs’ house, with Michele assigning food—Italian one meeting, Middle Eastern or Mexican the next. A typical meeting

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