The following is an edited version of a sermon given at the First Congregational Church of Rochester, July 30, 2023.
Why Do We Go To Church?
I got the idea for this message's subject from a friend, Mary, while we were sitting in the local coffee shop. "You know what I want to hear a sermon about? she challenged. "Why We Go To Church". That was a fine subject, I thought, so I did a little research.
Everybody doesn’t go to church. Half of Americans
don’t go to church even once a month. Interestingly enough, though, a lot of people who stay
at home on Sunday mornings actually believe in God. Barna research says that ¾
of unchurched people own a bible, 2 of 3 say they are spiritual.
So, some folks who believe in God go to church and
some stay home and we still have to answer Mary’s question. Why do we….the ones
in church this morning….go to church? I thought I knew why I did, but needed to see what other folks had to say, so I asked them.
ANSWERS
When I was a very young Christian, this is what I was
told: We go to get fed by the Word. That sounded right at first. Another answer was that we go to be encouraged or corrected in faith matters.
— also sounded right, but these days, when I'm a little farther down the faith road, it seemed a little too pat and didn’t get to the root of
the matter.
A surprising number of the people I asked said they go because they’re
supposed to or because they’ve always done it. That's also true, but
also falling short of a real motivating reason.
So I kept asking. As it turned out, a lot of the
people I asked had answers like these;
We go for the fellowship of people who think like we
do.
I go because I need a positive influence in my life,
because it makes me feel good, because the people are nice, because I’m
accepted as who I am.
I feel closer to God when I go to church, in a small
church around people who are like me, who have God in their lives.
Church is the pillar that holds the rest of my life
together. It is not a foundation for my faith, but self-preservation. I need
it.
Now I was getting somewhere.
This last group of people all thought it had something
to do with supporting and being supported, with sharing and understanding. That
made sense.
We sometimes refer to the church as the house of God
and Ps 84 says that one day in God’s courts is better than a thousand
elsewhere, but Jesus said that God doesn’t live in this or any building. God
lives primarily in us. So maybe we come here because even though there is
enough God in every believer, when two or three are gathered He isn’t just in
us individually, He’s in us corporately, and when we’re together, we are
enabled to do something new in His name. I liked that and thought it was
leading me in a significant direction.
It does feel good and right to spend intentional time
with people who think like we do, who believe the same way, and with whom we
can build and work and contribute. It makes us feel safe. It makes us feel
effective. We belong. But there are also dangers that come with doing that –
the unintended consequences of hanging out intentionally and regularly with
people we love and who think like we do.
DANGERS
Danger #1: It can lead to self-satisfaction and
complacency. When everyone around us agrees with us, we tend to think we’re
right.
Danger #2: It resists change and change is necessary.
Warm fuzzies don’t usually come with change. We want to do what we’ve always
done, but we are an ever-changing group gathered around an eternal gospel and
it’s only the gospel that doesn’t change.
Danger #3: It can make it hard to fold in the new
people God brings us, people who will necessarily upset our familiar apple
cart, or at least rearrange it.
Don’t think that can happen here? It happened in the good
and loving church that helped me to my first intimacy with God. And it happened
slowly, so slowly that we hardly noticed. In the end, the devastation was so
complete that it broke some of our hearts. For others, it broke their faith.
And I learned something in the process. I learned that any church can lose its
way, but there are some warnings signs for churches that
start to stray.
1) One warning sign is treating
church like a club– Clubs are by definition exclusive and we don’t get to
exclude anyone because Jesus didn’t. We have to take great care that whatever
membership we establish in a church doesn’t artificially lift up members simply
for the reason that they belong. We are to be set apart for God, but we are not
to set ourselves apart from our fellow men by pride in ourselves as being
members of this church or Congregationalists or Protestants. Those are man’s
separations, not God’s.
2) Another is thinking
of church as a theatrical display to be watched. Our times together are not to
be observed but a common prayer to be participated in. We are here to be
together, to raise one voice to God, to be more together than we can be alone.
It doesn’t matter how eloquent we are or how good our singing voices sound. We
gather to give our best to God, whatever it is, and not to the ears of other
men, even our own parishioners.
3) Another is thinking
of church as a religious jamboree designed to make us feel good. Church is a
privileged encounter with Christ. With or without bread and wine, it is
supposed to be an intense communion. It’s like any time we get together with
someone we care about. We talk and eat. Orderly but not by rote. Organized but
not automatic. An outpouring of love from all sides. God speaks to us. We
respond.
4) There is also danger in thinking
of church in terms of an institution or a denominational affiliation. The giveaway is
saying "I am a…". Those are the creation
of men, not God. God’s church is a movement of believers where people share
collectively and apply what God has given them. Locally, we are a very small
part in a worldwide machine that Jesus set in motion to encourage people to
holiness – different but not better, faithful in fellowship only to Him who
gave His life for us all.
We love our church and we love each other. It’s one of
the reasons we show up Sunday after Sunday, but we have to be aware of the bear
traps, because when we have the courage to declare ourselves to the world as a
group gathered for the specific purpose of honoring the creator of the
universe, bear traps come with the territory. Labeling ourselves a church tells
the world we are different. It wasn’t always that way.
HOW WE GOT HERE – HISTORY
For the first 1500 years after Christ, everybody in
western Europe was Catholic. The word Catholic means universal because it was. Nobody
was anything else. The sacred was part of everyday life and everybody shared in
it together. During the Reformation, common life began to be separated from
faith life because, for the first time, Christians had choices. Reformers expected at first that they would
fix what they thought was wrong with the Catholic church and go forward united
in belief and practice, but that didn’t happen. The Reformation created
division not only from a corrupt Catholic church but from other protestant denominations
to the point that competing denominations went to war. Things got so bad that
Reformers could see no way to stop the bloody conflict other than to worship
separately in order to govern corporately. This is the origin of the separation
between church and state and ultimately, between church and every other aspect
of life, but it worked. The new protestant denominations that resulted from the
Reformation eventually stopped killing each other and figured out how to live
socially side by side, but only by coming to terms with an institutionalized
separation between sacred and secular that persists today and continues to
widen so that God is disconnected more and more from common society.
So, In the 1500s or 1600s, religion and politics
parted ways and here we are, 500 years later, dealing with the aftermath. It’s
easy to forget that one of the only places left where we can combine our faith
and community lives is in the church. Now, the church as we know it has become
the only place where the sacred and the secular can come together again. Church
is the place we come specifically to learn from God and also learn how to live
those lessons outside the church. This is where our feeling of community comes
from. This is why it feels so special, because it is.
The church is
the only place we can teach, exhort, encourage, and advise one another
regarding how to live our faith in common ways in the world. We have to gather
to do this because there is nowhere else to go. The divorce between community
and faith life is virtually complete.
This is the legacy of the Reformation:
1) Religion
changed from a way of common life to simply ones’ own choice and opinion
regarding God, beliefs, devotion, and worship. We call this religious freedom
but it has become at the same time religious confusion and detachment. Religion
became intellectual rather than visceral, a mind activity rather than a heart one.
2) We
now have the right to our own religious anything, subject to our own rules and opinions
and we can change our mind at any time for any reason to the point of
absurdity. One of my college classmates had his drivers' license picture taken with a colandar on his head because he convinced the DMV that is was part of his religion. The prank started as a test and ended up an example of the scrambled religious world we live
in. No civil law reins us in. Church has become about self – our decision to
believe. Our decision to join. Something that started as very public became
something private.
3) Religion
has been demoted to just another pastime to be taken up or put down, a kind of
hobby like fishing or painting rather than what it was intended to be – the
most important way we inform, educate, and guide our lives together. It may not
be a good thing for faith to be dictated by the state, but it is also not a
good thing for faith to be parted from the fabric of our lives altogether.
4) We
are now a secular, not a religion-based society – not a religious world. Not
anymore. There is a kind of strength and growth in learning how to agree to
disagree but it does not bring with it a clear way forward. As a result, our
common society feels lost.
God, however, is still working. The same confusion
that we inherited from the reformers puts the church in a unique position. It
makes churches stand out. It gives church special status and visibility. And
most important, it makes the church a potential haven for the sacred. The
church, of all the places we can choose in this world, can be the one place we
remember and act out something better.
We Can be a Haven for the Sacred in This
Secular World
This is how it’s done – this is what the church does
that helps us fulfill God’s intent for us as the bride of Christ:
We share bread and wine in a banquet that’s happened
for hundreds of years, and will happen into eternity. God feeds us, we feed one
another, and become one people in Him. We don’t just remember – we participate.
This is the communion He made specifically for us and it is, like every other
behavior He specified, the best of what we can know in this world.
We pray together, not because we’re eloquent, but
because we’re needy. We state our faith together. We sing not because we’re
good singers but because words sometimes just aren’t enough to express the
glory we find in God. We come together to learn how to make all the parts of
our life work together again – the sacred and the secular – and we do that
because we understand that nothing is really secular if we do it right.
Everything belongs to God and is for God.
We study the Bible together because even though we do
it alone and hear God in the silence of our private hearts, He reveals another
layer of Himself when we do it together.
We make church a place of conscious and active
participation in building up not our own parish customs, but building up the universal
kingdom of God. Where two or three are gathered isn’t just His promise to be
here in church – it’s a reminder that He is already both here and in the larger
world and He wants us to engage with it in His name.
When we do these things, we declare to whom we belong,
in church and out, we become the light Christ asked us to be.
CONCLUSIONS – The Answer
So why do we go to church?
1. We
go to church to learn to live together in spiritual health and holiness. If we
depend on ourselves for spiritual understanding, all we get is ourselves. We
may get input from God if we’re listening carefully, but we won’t get the
benefit of what God has done in anybody else. There is value in learning the
layers of meaning and the richness of the Bible, and in understanding church
doctrine and history, but we can read the Bible at home and God will speak
truth to us. We need each other to discover more.
2. We
go to church to learn to live together in practical union. The head of the
church is Christ and we operate only in union in His name. In union. As one, in
His one church, but with different views, backgrounds, and opinions. Being
patient and grace-filled with one another. We go to church to learn how to
apply our faith in the real world, first among the brethren who think like us,
then in the world of those who do not.
3. We
go to church to work. Not like we do a job – to build or to achieve or to earn
money. Instead, we come to church for its own sake, for the sake of the encounter
itself, not to support a building or gather money to pay our pastor or to
establish relationships. We do it for love, immediate love for God, like we hug
a child or feed the hungry or tend the sick. Church is a corporate declaration
that God is the highest possible good and we come to church to show Him in ways
beyond those we can do alone. We bring the best of what we have individually
and put them together to make more.
4. We
go to church because God’s lessons have to be applied in flesh and blood. The church
is at its root messy. We all have to be prepared for messy - it’s part of the church and what we’re
supposed to learn in it – how to get along. That’s why we call it a family.
From the beginning, the church functioned
not as a separate, privileged entity, but to show believers how to fold their
beliefs into everyday lives. Our primary connection to God remains individual,
but our way of working it out has to be communal. After all, we need to learn
to share earth because we will undoubtedly share heaven. We may choose our
companions in this life, but God will choose them for us in the hereafter. This
is why living a Christian life alone isn’t enough. Trying to live a life of
faith alone is like learning to play the piano on a cardboard keyboard. You
never make a mistake because no real music is produced.
1.
Hebrews
10:24-25: "And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love
and good deeds, not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of
doing, but encouraging one another—and all the more as you see the Day
approaching."
2.
Acts
2:42, 46: "They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and to
fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer... Every day they continued
to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate
together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of
all the people.”.
3.
Colossians
3:16: "Let the message of Christ dwell among you richly as you teach and
admonish one another with all wisdom through psalms, hymns, and songs from the
Spirit, singing to God with gratitude in your hearts
We show we are Christians by our love, because when we
live and work together in Christ, we make each other better and thereby glorify
God. Our personal experience of God is enlarged by what we share together.
Church is the place where the gospel comes alive. The
setting may be a living room, a coffee shop, or an intentional building like
this one. They can all be churches when they all share two things in common –seeking
together the truth of God and the desire to live and love it out in the real
world.
And that, Mary, is why, and how, we go to church.
