Should Christians attend church?

Question 09053.

Should Christians attend church? I am aware that a minister answering this question is like a barber telling you that you need a haircut, so let me say at the outset that I am not arguing for the survival of an institution. I am arguing for something the New Testament assumes so completely that it never has to make the case.

The reason the question arises now is that a great many people stopped attending during the pandemic and discovered they could live without it. Some never came back. Others come occasionally and watch online otherwise. So the honest question is not whether attendance is nice, but whether a believer can flourish without it.

The One Verse Everybody Quotes

Hebrews 10:25 tells us not to neglect meeting together, as is the habit of some. It is the standard proof text and it is usually deployed rather badly, as though the writer were rebuking people for missing a service.

Look at what surrounds it. Let us hold fast the confession of our hope. Let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works. Not neglecting to meet together, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near. The gathering is not the point in itself. It is the setting in which believers do three things to each other that cannot be done at a distance: holding, stirring and encouraging.

And note the phrase as is the habit of some. People were already drifting in the first century, under persecution, when attending was dangerous. The pull away from the gathering is not a modern weakness. It is an old one.

Why the New Testament Assumes You Attend Church

There is no category in the New Testament for a Christian who does not belong to a local body. Not one letter is addressed to isolated individuals pursuing private devotion. They are written to churches, read aloud in gatherings, and full of instructions that require other people in the room.

Think about what you cannot do alone. You cannot be taught by a gift God gave to someone else. You cannot use your own gift, since gifts are given for the common good. You cannot receive the Lord’s Supper, which Paul describes as something done when you come together. You cannot bear a burden, confess to a brother, be corrected, or be missed.

When someone says they can worship God on a walk, I agree entirely. I have worshipped God on plenty of walks. But private worship and gathered worship are not competitors and one cannot substitute for the other, any more than talking to your wife on the phone replaces being at home.

The Objections Worth Taking Seriously

I am the church, so why attend church? This one contains a truth used to avoid an obligation. Yes, the church is people rather than a building. That is precisely why you cannot be it on your own. A body part detached from the body is not a smaller body. It is a casualty.

I was hurt by a church. This one I take with complete seriousness, because I have seen the damage and some of it was severe. If that is you, I would not push. But I would gently ask whether withdrawal is healing you or preserving the wound, and whether a different congregation, entered slowly and with your eyes open, might be part of the repair. Talk to a pastor somewhere before you decide the answer is never.

The church is full of hypocrites. It certainly contains some, as any honest minister will tell you. It also contains people at every stage of a long and uneven work of grace, and from the outside those two groups look identical. A hospital full of sick people is not an argument against hospitals.

What Online Church Can and Cannot Do

Streaming has been a genuine mercy for the housebound, the seriously ill and those in places where gathering is dangerous. I have no criticism of anyone in those categories and I would not have the pastoral instinct of a stone if I did.

But for those who can attend church and choose not to, a screen delivers content while removing everything else. You cannot be greeted by a screen. You cannot pray with one, or be noticed by one when you look wretched. Nobody at a livestream sees that you have come in alone for the third week and asks how you are.

There is also the matter of what watching does to you over time. A viewer evaluates. A worshipper participates. The longer someone watches, the more the service becomes a performance to be assessed rather than a body to be joined. My article on whether online church can replace attendance works through this at greater length.

What Happens to People Who Stop

I have watched this often enough to describe the pattern without exaggeration. It rarely begins with a decision to abandon the faith. It begins with a busy season, then a habit of one Sunday in three, then a vague sense that nothing much was missed.

What goes next is not usually belief but appetite. Bible reading thins. Prayer becomes occasional. Convictions soften in the direction of whatever the surrounding culture assumes, because there is no longer a community every week saying something different. Two or three years on, the person still believes in God and would describe himself as a Christian, and there is very little else there.

I am not saying that everyone who stops attending church loses their faith. I am saying I have never yet seen someone grow through drifting away. Coals removed from the fire go out, and they do it quietly.

What You Owe the Congregation

Most discussion of this question asks what the individual gets out of attending, which is exactly the wrong frame. 1 Corinthians 12 says each is given a manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. Your absence removes something from other people.

The elderly widow who looks for you. The young man who is watching how a Christian husband speaks to his wife. The person in the row behind who needed exactly the encouragement you would have given without thinking about it. None of that happens when you attend church only when you feel like it.

And there is the plain witness of it. A congregation that gathers week after week in a country that considers the whole thing obsolete is making an argument in public. Every empty seat weakens it slightly.

Attending Well Rather Than Just Attending

It follows that mere attendance is not the goal. A person can attend church for forty years and be spiritually untouched, and I have buried people about whom I was not sure. Presence is the beginning, not the achievement.

So come expecting God to speak. Pray for the preacher before the sermon rather than reviewing it afterwards. Arrive early enough to talk to somebody, and stay long enough to notice who is on their own. Sing even if your voice is poor, because you are not the audience.

And come on the weeks when you do not feel like it, which are the weeks it does most work. Feelings follow obedience far more often than the reverse, and the Sunday you least wanted to attend church is very often the one you later remember.

What Sunday Says About the Week

There is an argument for gathered worship that runs deeper than the practical benefits, and it concerns what the day itself declares. When believers attend church on the first day of the week, they are marking the resurrection. That is why the day changed. Jewish believers who had kept Sabbath all their lives began gathering on the day the tomb was found empty, and they did it at real cost.

So attendance is a weekly statement about what happened. In a culture that treats Sunday as an extension of Saturday, a congregation walking into a building at half past ten is saying something the neighbours can see, whether or not anyone speaks. The disciples gathered on the first day of the week to break bread, as Acts 20:7 records without comment, as though it needed none.

It also shapes the rest of the week. A person who has been reminded on Sunday who God is, what He has done and what he himself is for carries that into Monday. Take the reminder away and the week grows over the truth like grass over a path. That is not a superstition about a particular day. It is an observation about how memory works in creatures like us.

When You Genuinely Cannot Attend Church

I should say a word to those for whom this is not a matter of will. Illness, disability, caring responsibilities, shift work and mental health can make it impossible for someone to attend church at all, and the last thing such a person needs is an article telling them they are drifting.

If that is you, hear this plainly: God is not counting your absences. The congregation’s duty in your direction is the active one, and a church where nobody has visited the housebound in months has a problem that has nothing to do with you. Ask for what you need. Most churches want to help and simply do not know.

And for everyone else, there is a duty here that is easy to miss. The person who cannot attend church is still a member of the body, and the body is meant to come to them. That is a job for members rather than ministers, and it is one of the few things in church life where a single visit can change somebody’s month. Who has not been seen for a while?

Bringing Somebody With You

There is one more reason to attend church that rarely appears in these discussions, and it concerns the person who will never come on their own. Most people who come to faith in Britain came first because somebody invited them, and an invitation only works if the person issuing it is going anyway.

That is a quiet argument for regularity. A believer who attends church erratically has nothing to offer a neighbour, because there is no dependable answer to the question of where and when. A believer who is there every week can say, I am going on Sunday, come with me, and I will pick you up at half past ten. Andrew found his brother and brought him to Jesus, as John 1:42 records in a single sentence, and the whole of Peter’s ministry followed from it.

So when you attend church this week, come with somebody in mind. Not as a project to be managed, but as a person you would like to sit beside. My article on the purpose of the church sets out why witness belongs to the gathering rather than only to the individual.

So, now what?

If you have drifted, the way back is simpler and less humiliating than you imagine. Choose next Sunday. Turn up. Nobody will interrogate you, and the people who notice will mostly be glad. If the gap is long, send a message to the minister beforehand so that you are expected rather than exposed.

If you attend church faithfully already, look sideways this week. Somebody in your congregation stopped coming and nobody has rung them. That call is not the minister’s job alone. Whose name came to mind as you read that sentence?

I was glad when they said to me, Let us go to the house of the LORD!

Psalm 122:1 (ESV)