From wherever you’re sitting, this likely feels like a low point for the church in America. (Elsewhere it’s a different matter.)
Some of our neighbors see the church as an agent of reaction, pressing the brakes on every major movement for progress since the country’s founding. Others believe the church is a wolf in the process of losing its sheep’s clothing, finally being revealed as toxic, abusive, and self-protective. For still others, the church is a nonstarter, even invisible. Perhaps older generations attended services at Christmas and Easter and more recent generations claimed they did. No need to pretend anymore.
For those of us who remain committed to church—even pastors, apologists, and Christian writers—it may feel tempting to meet this moment by downplaying the church as much as we can. You don’t have to go to church to be Christian, we might say. Christianity is about a personal, individual relationship with Jesus. What matters is whether you know him, follow him, love him, in your daily life. Organized religion may help some folks, but it’s okay if that’s not you. Try a sermon podcast instead.
I’d like to offer a different perspective. It isn’t exactly a theological case, though not because there isn’t one. As I’ve written elsewhere, theologically speaking, there is one reason and one reason only to go to church: God.
If the God of the gospel is the one true and living God, then every one of us should be at church every Sunday morning (and more). If not—if Jesus did not rise from the dead—then the church is built on a lie, our faith is futile, and “we are of all people most to be pitied” (1 Cor. 15:16–19). If the gospel were false, church would be a waste of time, even if it added decades to our lives and absolutely ensured our total personal flourishing. If the God of Abraham is fictional, if he is not the maker of heaven and earth, it would be better to live in the truth and be miserable than to playact the liturgy and be happy.
But by definition, Christians believe the gospel is true. And if it is true, then church—“the church of the living God, the pillar and bulwark of the truth” (1 Tim. 3:15, NET) and Christ’s “body, the fullness of him who fills all in all” (Eph. 1:23, ESV)—is a vital element of human life lived to the utmost.
That’s why the instinct to meet our culture’s critique or ignorance of the church by downplaying its import is so misguided. Church is not an optional add-on to Christian faith. It is how we learn to be human as God intended. Indeed, it makes possible truly human life before God.
Church has what we need, the purpose and community and cultivation of virtue for which the rest of our culture is grasping in the dark. It’s right here. It’s nothing to be coy or embarrassed about. It’s nothing to apologize for. Church is what people are hungering for, even if they don’t realize it. Sometimes we ourselves don’t realize it.
Consider some popular recent diagnoses of what ails our society, especially our families and young people. Jonathan Haidt’s An Anxious Generation indicts the “screen-based” childhood of Gen Z and Gen Alpha. Abigail Shrier’s Bad Therapy decries the colonization of education and parenting by a faux-scientific, quasi-religious therapeutic worldview. James Davison Hunter, Yuval Levin, and Rob Henderson detail the economic precarity haunting the public square, and a growing list of writers including Richard Reeves and Louise Perry have analyzed our confusion about gender, embodiment, work, marriage, and raising children.
We’re even seeing secular thinkers exploring anew the practical and cultural benefits of Christianity—so much so that Justin Brierley has written a book titled The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God. Besides recounting actual conversions, he engages intellectuals who want to be Christian but can’t (yet) bring themselves to convert, a notable development in a supposedly secular age.
Now step back and consider what these authors prescribe.
They tell us that people generally and children particularly flourish when parents are married, when families are intact, when households and neighborhoods are bustling with brothers, sisters, and cousins.
Kids need to be outdoors playing with friends, not indoors on screens. They need to be literate—readers of books that not only provide wisdom but also take them on imaginative adventures.
They need to be charged with good work, with helping their neighbors and serving the least of these. They need to be embedded in a variety of intergenerational social settings that teach them how to navigate uncertain and sometimes risky relationships with peers as well as adults.
And speaking of adults, children need mentors on whom they can rely. They need rituals that mark transitions, whether from childhood to adolescence or adolescence to adulthood. They need spaces in which to feel free to discuss and debate aloud, with friends and trusted adults alike, what it means to be male or female.
They need tech-free spaces in which to inhabit their bodies and be present to others: old and young, black and white, married and single, disabled and able-bodied. They need to suffer boredom—during a sermon, say, or a long budget meeting—and lack an obvious way to stanch it. They need to see adult friendships at both their best and their most challenging.
Now, if you were to design from scratch a local institution to fill to these needs for any child, individual, or family of any income bracket, you’d end up with something very like the church. Even those outside the church are beginning to realize this. See The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson lamenting “the churchgoing bust” (although he’s an agnostic) or Haidt speaking of “a God-shaped hole in everyone’s heart” (although he’s an atheist).
In saying all this, I’m not suggesting the church is reducible to its role in solving social problems. It is more than this, but it is not less. Besides, our social problems are spiritual problems too—and the church is also where we learn to pray, to worship with others, to see what should be obvious but all too often eludes our grasp: that the world is charged with the grandeur of God. The church offers us the solemnity of rites and practices that train our eyes and hearts to stay focused on Jesus in a culture of perpetual irony, cheap snark, and easy entertainment.
None of this should be a shock from a theological perspective. God founded the church. It is no merely human institution. We should expect it to be finely tuned to the complex needs of the human experience—to help us with everything from early socialization to midlife crisis to dying well.
It’s true, to spin off a phrase from Jesus, that the church was made for man (Mark 2:27). In a deeper sense, though, man was made for the church. Humankind is meant for fellowship with God, and we have a foretaste of that feast in the church, the body of Christ. It’s where we were made to flourish. For what makes us flourish most supremely is found most powerfully there, where we worship together, hearkening to the Word and receiving the sacraments.
You’d think that Christians would see the opportunity here—the chance to tell our society that we have what it’s seeking, that a local institution responsive to these social ills already exists. But for the most part we’re failing to seize the moment, and I think the reason is twofold.
related
At the cultural level, American Christians tend to treat the church as an embarrassing encumbrance or a bait and switch, something to be endured if you want to follow Jesus.
On the contrary: The church is the selling point. I don’t mean that we want people joining churches for the social perks. I mean that Christ himself has made the offer of the gospel one and the same as the offer of joining a people. Just as we cannot have the Father without the Son (1 John 2:23) or adoption by God without adoption by Abraham (Gal. 3:6–4:7), so we cannot have Christ without his body and bride (Eph. 2:1–22). It’s a package deal. The Lord and his family come together; either we have both or we have neither.
In a different context, the Protestant theologian Philip Melanchthon once remarked that to know Christ is to know his benefits. Something like that is true here as well: The church is a haven for humanness. It’s a school for learning to be human like Jesus, the one true fully human being. Accordingly, given the challenges of our day, the church is a training ground for antifragility.
Whatever you call it, the church is there for a reason. It is not an encumbrance. It is not organized religion you can take or leave. Minus the church, the gospel is bodiless, incorporeal, ghostly. According to Scripture, the community to which Christ has forever bound himself is none other than the church (Eph. 5:25–33; 1 Cor. 12:4–27; Rev. 21:1–14). The living God dwells there. In this world, therefore, the church is where fullness of life is found. Let’s act like it.
At the congregational level—and admittedly this is anecdotal—what I see is churches anxious about their falling status, nervous about losing Gen Z, and eager to give the people what (church leaders think) they want. The religious landscape has become a marketplace, and churches compete with one another by offering an ever-flashier product. More technology, louder worship, fewer rituals, catchier slogans, and a whole lot of therapeutic jargon. Something to be entertained by. Something to keep the boredom at bay. Perhaps even something to go viral on socials.
The lesson we should have learned long ago is that the more the church is indistinguishable from the world, the less the world has any reason to take an interest in it. The church cannot do better therapy than counselors, better concerts than rock bands, or better TED talks than best-selling authors. In a competition to entertain, the church will always lose to brunch and the NFL.
The more we try to play catch-up to Hollywood, Nashville, and Silicon Valley, the less distinct the church will be—and the less suited to its purpose of worshiping God and forming humans. The practical benefits of the church’s common life are not its proper center. They are byproducts of the Spirit gathering a human community around the incarnate Son of God, and they will deteriorate or vanish altogether if we are no longer centered on Christ.
Every generation of the church has some urgent question to answer. Ours is not about Christology or iconography or even soteriology. It’s about theological anthropology, the doctrine of the human being.
We Christians know something about what it means to be human—and the many ways being human can go wrong—and our society is desperate for answers to this question. Thankfully, our neighbors don’t have to read Augustine or Calvin or even Paul to figure it out. Being human isn’t something you learn by reading. You learn to be human with other humans, in company with the people of God. In other words, at church.
God has shown us how to be human in Christ, and we learn the lesson in his school, alongside fellow lifelong learners (that’s what “disciple” means, after all). Let’s have the confidence to show others. Let’s say with the psalmist, “Come and see what God has done, his awesome deeds for mankind,” and “let me tell you what he has done for me” (Ps. 66:5, 16). The world is knocking on the door. Let’s invite them to come inside.
Brad East is an associate professor of theology at Abilene Christian University. He is the author of four books, including The Church: A Guide to the People of God and Letters to a Future Saint: Foundations of Faith for the Spiritually Hungry.
