Communion Is a Social Skill

by Rosie Chinea Shawver, MDiv

We recently hosted a webinar for our Service & Justice Innovation Hub, specifically for the cohort forming Emily and me, as part of our grant work with the University of Notre Dame's Lilly Endowment initiative. The conversation, after our presentation, started in a familiar place: ministers talking about how to help young people build basic social skills. It ended somewhere much bigger.

Here’s the thread we followed. Teaching a student to make eye contact, hold a conversation, or sit with someone unlike them is not a soft skill. It is formation. It is teaching students to form deeper relationships. Because those small social skills are the on-ramp to something deeper: communion. You cannot be in communion with someone you cannot sit with.

And communion, once it starts happening at the level of a shared meal or a shared conversation, does something specific. It puts people in the same room who would not otherwise choose each other. A dorm floor. A service trip. A dining hall table. Real communion is not selective. It is not curated. It forces contact with people who think differently, come from different places, carry different wounds.

That forced proximity is the point. It is how bridges get built. Not bridges as a metaphor for tolerance, but bridges as the literal skill of staying at the table with someone you disagree with, because you have already broken bread with them. Once you have done that, you start asking a different question. Not “what do I need,” but “what does the common good require.” 

That question does not come from a lecture. It comes from practice. The common good is not an abstraction you teach from a slide. It is a muscle you build by being fed next to someone, and feeding someone in return. A student who has never had to share a table with someone unlike them will talk about the common good as a nice idea. A student who has actually sat there, stayed there, and been changed by it knows the common good as a discipline - something that costs you a preference here, an assumption there, a little bit of being right. That is the difference between knowing the phrase and knowing the practice. Campus ministry is one of the last places young adults get formed in the practice, not just the phrase. 

This matters right now because loneliness among young people is not a side issue. It is one of the defining struggles of this generation. Campus ministers see it up close: students who are constantly connected and profoundly isolated at the same time. We do not think the fix is another program or another app. We think the fix is communion, practiced deliberately, starting with the basic social skills that make it possible.

But here is the part we cannot skip past. Communion costs something. It is not comfortable. It asks you to sit with someone who annoys you, to stay in a conversation past the point where you want to leave, to be present when your instinct is to withdraw. It is a risk. You do not know how the other person will respond, and you cannot control the outcome. That is exactly why it works. Growth does not come from the safe choice. It comes from the risk.

So part of our job in campus ministry is not just to create opportunities for connection. It is to teach young people, explicitly, that this will cost them something, and that the cost is worth paying. That is a harder message than “come to our event.” It asks something of them. But it is the truer invitation, and it is the one that actually builds people who can hold a diverse, disagreeing, difficult common good together.

That is what a room full of ministers came to on a Monday afternoon webinar. Not a new curriculum. A recovered conviction: teach the small skills, because they lead to the shared table, and the shared table is where isolation actually ends.