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People don’t go to church for a lot of reasons, but a Christian without a church is a Christian in trouble. Sadly, the number of professing Christians is far larger than the number who attend weekly meetings. Many churches experienced an acceleration of this trend during Covid as well: professing Christians have returned to school, work, and leisure, but have not returned for regular church gatherings. Why? Everyone is a unique case in the specifics, but there are trends we see in the wake of the pandemic: people have elevated political and medical (mask & vaccine) opinions over faith commitments and demoted their faith so it is not the primary identity marker in their life.
What does this mean for the church? Is it doomed? I don’t
think so, but Christians need to rediscover that the church can have different
political and medical opinions, but still love each other, be on mission, and gather for
Jesus. Christians need to remember that the fact that Jesus died on the cross
and rose from the dead to defeat sin and death is the cornerstone of our identity.
And when Jesus rose, his Apostles brought together his people for regular worship.
Christians should return to church because we belong to God,
because Christ gave his body, and then he formed a body of believers from every
tribe, language, people, and nation. (Revelation
5:9) If this describes a tension in your life, I encourage you to regather with
your local Church because that is where we experience God’s love and presence with
others; this draws us out of selfish cocoons and help us discover healing that
this world cannot offer.
Gathering together is a lot like coming to the frontier fort to restock, recuperate, regroup -- and then go back out to the actual wilderness where we live and work. We will definitely run out of supplies, and not be able to share what we've learned about the wilderness out there, if we don't come back together regularly.
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