Dec 09 +James Why go to Church?

Can’t find time to pray?  Never mind.  According to a recently launched web-site in America, you can find salvation on-line.  A ‘Copper Subscription’ (bargain at a mere 30 dollars) buys you 30 days-worth of other people’s prayers.  Or, if you’re really desperate (and have money to burn) you can take out the platinum subscription which lasts for a whole year!


Of course that sounds absurd.  But research suggests that many people apply the same sort of thinking to church-going. So long as a member of your (extended) family goes, or even perhaps a friend, that will somehow keep you in touch and in favour with the Almighty.  Vicarious religion, not least in the countryside, is still alive and well. That’s why some argue that ‘Back to Church Sunday’ should be re-named.  ‘Most of the people round us’ they say ‘don’t come to Church – but wouldn’t ‘come back’ because they don’t believe they’ve ever left’.

So why does it matter whether or not we actually attend church services?  I would be a rich man if I had a pound for everyone who has told me something like ‘you don’t have to go to church to be a Christian’.  There are all sorts of reasons why I don’t agree with them, but I’ll confine myself to mentioning just three.

The first is because God wants it.  Throughout the Bible there are dozens of encouragements to us all to worship the Lord, and they don’t mean just by walking on the fells or pruning the roses.  Yes, we can worship God by doing both those things – but no, in themselves they aren’t enough. God quite clearly wants us to get together with other believers and focus our attention quite specifically on him. As John Wesley once observed, the Scriptures know nothing of solitary Christianity: and ‘supporting the Church’ means rather more than simply turning up at the occasional jumble-sale!

The second reason is that although God doesn’t actually need us to worship him, we do. There is a very significant moment in the play ‘Equus’ (by Peter Shaffer) when a psychiatrist says ‘Without worship, we shrivel’.  There is now evidence suggesting that going to Chruch makes you healthier and longer-lived! And as G K Chesterton so wisely observed, if we don’t worship God, it isn’t that we worship nothing.  We worship anything.  We have been made in the image of God, and we can only grow in that image if our natural instinct for worship is properly directed.  People worship all sorts of strange and wonderful gods in 2009:  everything from choice to celebrity via ‘being myself’ and the ‘right to happiness’.  But there is only one true object of worship, and He has revealed Himself to us in the person of Jesus Christ.

The third reason is because the others need us.  We tend to think about worship in terms of what we get out of it. What really matters is what we put into it, and a significant aspect of our contribution is the encouragement we give to our fellow worshipers.  It isn’t just that we are diminished by non-attendance. They are too.

Last year the proportion of UK adults attending Church at least once rose in the North West from 21% to 28%.  Many of those went at Christmas, with Carol and Christingle Services packed out. That’s a tremendous increase: but it’s only the beginning.  The challenge for us all is how to help those people realise that Church – like a dog – isn’t only for Christmas.

James Newcome