Go To Church Anyway.

Because it matters.

And let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, ²⁵ not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day approaching.

-Hebrews 10:24-25

I’m going to say something that will bother many people, but I’m going to say it anyway.

Go to church. Go to church in person. Go to church even if it’s two degrees below outside with an even colder wind chill. Go to church even if it’s sunny and 80 degrees outside. Go to church even if you feel tired. Go to church even if your life is a mess. Go to church even if you don’t feel like it.

Just. Go. To. Church.

So the reason I have this bee in my bonnet is because of a post I saw on Facebook the other day from a church consultant that said the following: “As churches flounder, faith flourishes.”

And that’s when I lost it.

It’s hard enough to be a pastor in the times that we live in, but it’s nigh impossible when people within the church are the ones telling you that the thing you are called to do is a waste of time.

empty church

There was a time in our culture when people were in church because that’s what you did. As a proud member of Generation X, I grew up in a time when church-going was still a big part of American life. I can remember 30 years ago when I was just out of college and living in Washington, D.C., and I attended this Baptist church in town. And I was a fairly regular attender, but there were some Sundays I just didn’t go to church. I was young and in my 20s. I had always gone to church, but this was a time in my life when I decided there were some Sundays when I just didn’t go to church. When I called back home in Michigan, my mother would ask if I had gone to church, and being a good kid, I would be truthful. If I said no, my mother would not be pleased. She believed going to church mattered, and she kept going to church, even after she suffered a stroke a few months before she died in 2024. Only a severe illness in her final days kept her from attending.

Maybe I’m an old fuddy-duddy, but I think being in a physical church matters. Now, I’m not saying that online church is all bad. My temp-making job involves a lot of time on social media. But there is something about church in that it’s a gathered community, made up of people from different walks of life and backgrounds.

And, frankly, it’s not easy to experience all that through a screen.

But I don’t think it can, at least not well. Yes, you can do some things in faith by yourself. I try to do my morning prayers each day, with emphasis on the word try, but, It’s really hard to do faith on your own all the time. We really understand God in community. The best example of that is one of my favorite stories, The Road to Emmaus, which is found in Luke 24. Two of Jesus’ disciples are on the road, discussing Jesus dying on the cross, when the risen Christ walks alongside them. They don’t know it’s Jesus at first. The two invite this stranger to dinner, and as Jesus literally breaks bread with them, it’s in that moment that their eyes are opened. It’s in the community that they meet the living God.

Church, especially in mainline and progressive circles, is something that I don’t think we value anymore. We’re increasingly closing churches, and sometimes it seems like we don’t seem to care about planting new ones. The quote I saw on Facebook, seemed to express a belief that faith can happen privately, alone, without other people, and without community.

Theologian Andrew Root is not just a great theologian; he’s also a great storyteller. In several of his books he tells stories of fictional churches to hammer home his theological points. Whether he knows it or not, he also helps us to see how it is in community that people get to know God. It’s really in community that we understand who God is. And the thing about community, a community gathered by God, is that it’s usually made up of people that we don’t normally want to be around.

The writer Amy Peterson wrote in 2024 about using the title of Why Go to Church Anyway? She’s writing this essay to people who have deconstructed and have wondered, why do I need to even go to church? Why does it matter? Peterson gives a lot of good reasons why you should go to church and how it’s drawing you out of Kronos time and into Kairos time and how it allows you to be bored and how it forms you, especially by the prayer and by the liturgy. But the one that I think really stuck out is how church puts you into a community of people who are unlike you. She says:

“Where else will I find an 80-year-old Republican woman in hose and heels sitting in the same pew as a 35-year-old trans deadhead, a man recently out of prison, passing to peace with a retired military officer, an autistic tween welcomed as a videographer and a five-year-old’s insights into Bible stories, treasured and retold.

And all of this, not just once, but week after week after week.”

She continues.

“I don’t always like being with people who are unlike me. It’s easier to be with people who listen to the same kind of music and read the same kind of books I do. I do not always like to be with people at all. Usually, I prefer to be independent and solitary. As Phil Christman said once, though, Christianity is the inconvenience and annoyance with other people and the terror of being known. The reality is I am not independent and solitary, and the church helps me to live into the reality of our damaged humanity and admit my need for help.”

I remember my time as an associate pastor in Minneapolis, where two of the people who were part of the congregation were a man who had schizophrenia, and another one was a man with mental disabilities. Neither of these folk was a person I would normally hang out with, but both, I think, had gifts to share. I’m glad to have met them and glad to have known them. This matters, especially in our culture, where it is so easy to meet people, and we don’t have to talk to people who are different from us, especially on social media.

And that relates to another thing.

Too often, I notice people acting as if they can only come to church when their life is perfect. That’s silly. Church is not for people whose lives are perfect. Read the Bible. The fact is, Jesus met up with people whose lives were never perfect. People whose lives were a mess. And yet Jesus met them. He didn’t run away from them. Church is not a place for people whose lives are perfect. One example is from my own life. I came to church the day after my mother died.

When your mother dies, your life just collapses. My life was pretty messed up. The day after she died was a Sunday. I was supposed to preach, but thankfully someone stepped in. I’m a stoic person, so I wasn’t emotionally a mess, but inwardly, I was a mess. But I was there. I needed to be there. And i think that everyone whose lives are there who are people who are there need to be at church even if they’re a mess even if they’re as i’ve heard ugly crying you need to be at church you need to be with other people to admit your help, to know that there are people there to help you to receive the bread and the wine to know that there is a God whose body was broken for you and blood shed for you, who was broken, who cried, just like you did, with you. That’s what church is all about. It’s not about perfection.

So go to church. Go to church, even if you don’t have time, even if you don’t feel like it, because when you go to church, you will meet others who will be there to help you, who will be Christ to you, because when you go to church, you will find that your faith will flourish.