I love your honesty, as I believe the Body of Christ is lacking it in general. I think your own statement is key:

“But we have lost the idea of communion/community. For this reason, I believe we have magnified our struggle against meaninglessness.”

I once lived life in deep depression, and would say that my life at that time felt meaningless. I tried doing the right things: playing drums in the praise band, helping with the youth, tithing 10% pre-tax, all those things. Nothing helped. I finally found relationship with God outside the trappings of “church”, lived in the desert for 5 years while I learned to rely solely on Him, and now in the last year have begun being knit by Him with fellow believers in my home town. I now have meaning in my life.

I believe that we have to start with a basis of true community, outside the trappings of modern church, where there is mutual edification, mutual support, bearing of burdens, and unfailing honesty like Dan has shown in this post. I believe we have to put on hold the things that we feel in our heart we “should be doing”, like evangelizing more, giving more, etc. etc. Once we get an established community of believers, and our mutual support for one another grows, and we continue to grow, then we can allow the Spirit to lead us into what he would have us do. Maybe initially it is moving widgets. Once we’ve proven we can find joy in the “small things”, he may move us on to something “bigger”. The key, I believe, is in trusting in His plan, doing the last thing he told us to do until he tells us something else (and sometimes that seems to take forever), and then being willing to hear a direction that is different than what we expected.

To sum it up, maybe this could be said: Life seems meaningless because we have lost the sense of community that mankind was created to have, and therefore go unfulfilled in this basic aspect of our beings. Attending church and bible studies doesn’t necessarily count as community, as community will bring about a profound “knitting”, a building block of different, individual parts into one beautiful tapestry or building. There is no sense of meaninglessness when we catch site of the beauty of Him, His body, built together with US!! There is no meaninglessness when we see beyond our little world, to see that what He is doing is so much greater than we could ever realize, in full.

I hear you. Many in the Church (and often those with the most brash voices) want to keep us mired in the 16th century, as if nothing good has come about in Church history since then, as if every Christian born since then is an also-ran. I just don’t get that.