[lolinder]

> We would hang out afterwards, but that was limited to 0.2857 of our free afternoons/evenings.

I fully believe you that church never felt like your third place. That disconnect between generations is a large part of why churches have declined. But speaking as a parent of small children—if your parents were allocating two nights a week to go hang out at church with church friends, that was absolutely a third place for them. Parents simply don't have enough time with other adults to justify hanging out for hours two nights a week with adults that we don't enjoy chatting with.

> The leveling and inclusive aspect is key: you need to be able to bring anyone who might otherwise need a third place, and they must be greeted as just another conversation member.

A month ago I attended a random Protestant denomination with my father-in-law that we'd never been to before in our lives and had no intention of joining. We went to the gathering after the service and were welcomed as part of the group. They had lots of questions for us because we drove across the country to get there, but there wasn't anything weird about it, it was just people hanging out chatting.

I do want to clarify that I'm not saying that there weren't other third spaces that have also declined. But church was the universal third space that almost everyone had and generally assumed that you had. You might also have been a Freemason or a member of the Elks Lodge or have gone to hang out at a coffee shop, but the rest of our third space infrastructure was all built on the assumption that church was already there filling a lot of the needs.