The Power of Going to Church

Simple obedience to the Lord’s design transforms peoples and worlds.

Jesus knew what he doing when he designed the church. An assembly of folks who were dead (in sin) yet now alive (in him), gathering weekly (at minimum) to hear his Word and eat his body and drink his blood (figuratively speaking). Simple obedience to the Lord’s design transforms peoples and worlds. I remember this each week as our young, little church sings and prays and hears and eats the Word at the Table, together. Countless Christians from the nooks and crannies of the nations and the centuries would testify about this power.

I read just one of these testimonies this week. I started into the massive and magisterial new volume Biblical Critical Theory by Christopher Watkin. As the subtitle says, the book describes “how the Bible’s unfolding story makes sense of modern life and culture.” So far, the book is off to a strong start, but the context of the book has struck me even more than its content. Watkin explains his backstory: in college he learned the philosophies of the world while his faith grew through regular participation in the local church. While he was reading fancy French philosophers he was also hearing the gospel in the fellowship in the gospel.

Week after week my church was laying before us a feast of invigorating truths about the God of the Bible, helping us to shape a distinctive Christian attitude to life, the universe, and everything. I was constantly challenged by Christian women and men who thought deeply about the faith and about life. It was at church and among my Christian friends that I first discovered faith not as a set of ideas to believe but as a true story of the whole universe, a true tale of love, loss, promise, and costly rescue, in which we all play a role.

He credits this weekly rhythm of gathered Word-and-Table worship with forming his framework for understanding culture through the Bible. I said just now that this point forms the context for the book more than its content. That’s not exactly right, though. The book is about interpreting culture through the story of biblical truth. The context of the rhythms of church life shapes and matures one’s understanding of the world-interpreting content of the Word of God.

I think we underestimate the power of such consistent rhythms. Our cultural history of nominal Christians who attended church but had no life in themselves makes us suspicious about the power of the church’s worship and witness. Understandable. But narrow-minded. That’s only one section of the story, among many other stories. Jesus designed his church for maximum effectiveness at accomplishing his purpose: disciples who look like him. We tend to look for creative solutions to life-problems and soul-needs. We get bored with the basic things Jesus told us would change us. We get impatient with the slow process of growing up into Christ.

But there is no Plan B for the people of God. It takes a village to raise a child and it takes a church to raise a Christian, as Jeremy Treat has said recently. The church’s work of raising God’s children may be more than just the weekly gathering around the Word and the Table. But it certainly isn’t less. It’s family dinner every week where the Father feeds us. Years ago, Trevin Wax wrote about this. He said, rightly, that a thousand sermons (100 sermons a year times 10 years) will change your life. The supernatural normality of the rhythms of Jesus’s church irreparably changes those who engage with the life of the Spirit in their hearts.

Under the Word and at the Table, we run-in to fellow members, and these run-ins fuel the Spirit’s spark of mutual encouragement: “And let us consider one another in order to provoke love and good works, not neglecting to gather together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging each other, and all the more as you see the day approaching” (Hebrews 10:24-25). In other words, it’s easier to think about folks you see regularly. I’ve often experienced the limitations of my own capacity to cultivate friendships with folks who aren’t regularly in my life. When my wife and I were first married, we bought a house and moved 25 minutes away from where we’d previously lived. We joined a new church closer to home, and our friend networks shifted with our location and our church community. Our lives began to be shaped by the folks we saw regularly, at church.

Literally nothing else on earth can substitute for the Word and the Table, together. The Spirit speaks in the Word, shows out at the Table, and shows through your fellow members. So go to church. Hear the Word. Confess your sin. Break bread with the brethren. Lather, rinse, repeat.