Faith Works 10-10-2025

Faith Works 10-10-2025
Jeff Gill

"Why go to church" - a question with many answers
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There are churches that are growing, and those that are closing, but if you've been reading this column a while, you know the net number of people attending worship services any given week is declining.

Worship style debates are such old hat I hate to even get close to the subject. I will freely admit: I am impatient with those who prefer traditional and liturgical orders of worship who enjoy taking the cheapest of cheap shots at contemporary worship, but I can get just as frustrated with supporters of contemporary Christian music and worship built around it who resist any criticism of it.

Suffice it to say: traditional worship can be rote, tedious, and borderline depressing, and contemporary worship has the capacity to be just as mechanical or vacant with admittedly newer words and chords. Both can be true. Holy Spirit infused worship I have experienced in ancient forms, and at gatherings around a central drum set and with excellent audio (and even a fog machine). God shows up in mysterious ways, at a variety of venues.

So let's just leave it to your preference as to music or responsive readings, and move to the question "why go to church?" Because obviously many people are answering that one in the negative.

We're used to the framing of this proposition being that of divine command. It still gets used, but much less often: the idea that God demands you be part of communal, corporate worship each week, and not doing so is itself sin, a violation of church law and eternal commandments. Few churches make weekly attendance a requirement in a spiritual or a practical sense. I am just old enough to recall a time when in many Protestant bodies, a person holding a church office (elder, deacon, trustee) who missed a few Sundays in a row would be removed from their position; in earlier generations, poor church attendance would be cause for removing a person from membership rolls in many traditions. Those days are, a few exceptions aside, well in the past. Today, people miss Sundays with great frequency, and with no sense on their part or others that they might lose standing of any sort, officially or individually.

Short of restoring a preaching tradition that tells people God will frown on their patchy attendance, what's to be said, let alone done? A minister could soundly castigate people for missing Sundays over anything short of a coma or out of town funeral, but in today's church environment, you could only expect people to ask us "why?"

We could look at some scriptural roots of why this expectation could be seen as a necessity; certain traditions can page through canon law to explain the internal justification for it. I'd just like to offer to a willing ear a few practical reasons for going to church, and keeping up with your attendance.

The most obvious is the parallel between the physical and spiritual. The body is a temple, and maintenance of your spiritual sinews is not as different from your digestive needs or keeping your body's muscles in tone. Working out, or eating healthy, "occasionally" or when you "feel like it" is a recipe for failure . . . and everyone knows it. Why would the workings of your spirit, the health of your soul, be any different? They are not. You need to work out your heart in stretching your compassion, building up your soul's endurance, strengthen your spirit for the long haul.

In reply to this approach, I often hear versions of "I do such things regularly, but on my own." Yeah, well. The reality is few personal disciplines done on one's own are maintained over the long haul. You need mentors and sponsors and saints and role models. You need a faith community to stay spiritually healthy all your life long.

In other words, you need to go to church.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he goes to church on vacation, too. Tell him how you keep fit spiritually speaking at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads or Bluesky.