Why do we even go to church?

A question I have recently been contemplating, "Why do we go to church?"

Now, I should clarify, I am not asking this question from a place of contrarianism or crassness, I ask the question with the presumption that we should go to church, but I still think there is a value in asking why we go. By clearly establishing for ourselves the purpose of regular church attendance and membership, we can better guide our decisions about church life. Decisions about what ministries to focus on, or even decisions on what church we attend. More timely, this is a crucial question to keep in mind as we Christians struggle to navigate questions of how best to respond in the current cultural moment of social distancing and churches grappling with the question how to approach meeting, whether in person or less traditional means such as

I think it is worth noting quickly before proceeding, we're discussing here the overall purpose of the Church globally. Individual church congregations will likely have a far more defined mission which springs forth from this foundation.  A church might have as a special calling to focus on reaching out to the LGBTQIA community or offer special help to the homeless community in their area. These are things that all churches should be doing, but some churches may choose to make a special focus of more defined purpose. My intention here is to lay out general guidelines on the purpose of a local church, not the specific purpose of your local church. This is, I understand, a slight nuance that may not be clearly defined.

History of Church Meetings

It is worth taking a moment before we delve into those reasons to examine where the idea of meeting as a church came from in the first place. As with most questions of the Christian life, we must first go back to Judaism. The groups that eventually grew into the modern interpretation of the Synagogue originally started in the time period after the construction of the First Temple by King Solomon, and would have had a focus on the local Jewish community coming together to study the Torah of Moses and participate in daily prayers. These groups were secondary in focus to the Temple itself, where one would go for regular worship and sacrifice. However, the Babylonian Exile began sometime around 597 BCE, in which the Solomonic Temple was destroyed and a portion of the Jewish people were removed to reside in Babylon.

This period had a lasting catastrophic impact on the Jewish religion, and a number of practices would have changed at this time, including a new focus on the groups which in Hebrew were called the "beit k'neset," and translated in Greek were referred to as the Synagogue. This gathering, which has begun with the purpose of prayer and study of Scripture, took on a crucial role of preserving the Jewish identity in exile. This regular gathering allowed the community to support each other, spiritually, emotionally, and even financially, during a time period when little else seemed to connect them. They were no longer in the Promised Land, and could no longer visit the Temple. It is worth noting at this time, the Synagogue did not replace the Temple, it was not seen as a proper place for Sacrifice, and the Presence was not perceived in the same way as it was in the Holy of Holies. However, the Synagogue continued to take on a more central role in both Jewish life and the Jewish faith.

The construction of the Second Temple by Ezra and the return of the exiles to Israel returned some of the Temple centrality, but marked disappointment with the Second Temple (Ezra 3:12) likely played a part in the preservation of the Synagogue practice. As time went on and conflict and exile remained constant facts of life in the region, the Jewish Diaspora further drove the Synagogue as a practice among the faithful. It remained an identity marker, preserving Jewish life in the face of often hostile or at least alien lands. Giving Jewish families and extended communities a place to root themselves as the struggles of life pushed and prodded them to adapt and conform to the powers of empire that surrounded them. It's worth noting, the earliest known archaeological remains of a synagogue were found in Egypt, and date back to sometime in the Third Century BCE. The synagogue was at it's most crucial where Jews were made to feel the most "foreign."

This sets the stage for the time of Jesus, who taught in the Synagogue as a way of introducing his ministry. (Luke 4:14-15) After his death, burial, and resurrection, the early Christian community remained heavily tied to the Jewish community. Acts 2:46 gives us an early view of what the newly borne church looked like. "Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts." Temple life remained central for Christians in Jerusalem, and as the church spread outward, so too did the synagogue. This means that the early church meetings were defined both in similarity and in contrast to the synagogue meetings.

Attending time together as Christians, usually in someone's home, had the same effect for early Christians that the synagogue had for Jews in the Diaspora. It was a way of routinely getting together to affirm their unique identity. These particularly early Jewish Christians still attended worship in the Temple, affirming their identity as Jews, then met as a church to affirm their simultaneous identity as Christians. They saw their new faith as an outshoot of their Jewish foundation, but something that required its own time to be properly fed as a belief system.

The same passage in Acts gives us what's traditionally held to be a description of these early church meetings. It was a time of fellowship, eating together, learning the teachings of the early apostles, and prayer. (Acts 2:42) As the Church continued to grow, so too did the church assemblies. For the first century of the Church, these were still often tied to the local synagogues, but after the destruction of the Second Temple and Jerusalem in 70 AD, the Christian sect and Judaism as a whole began to drift further and further apart, no doubt aided by the earlier missionary work of men like Paul and Peter, who drew in Gentile converts without the inclusion of Jewish traditions, particularly the circumcision. The church assemblies remained, but where they had previously been seen as an addition to synagogue worship, they began to take on the role of synagogue replacement.

Reasons for church assembly

We must take this context then into mind when we consider what the purpose of attending church is. How did it originate with a faith that was often defined by exile and isolation? How did it continue after the separation from Judaism, absorbing the role of synagogue worship as well as defining the unique Christian identity? The Jewish Virtual Library defines a synagogue as "a place of prayer, study and education, social and charitable work, as well as a social center" and indeed, we see this reflected in the various traditional terms used for Synagogues in their history. As already mentioned, they were originally referred to as "beit k'neset," a Hebrew term for "house of assembly," which when translated to Greek gave us the word Synagogue. But other terms were used as well, "beit t'filah" means "house of prayer" and signifies the roles these assemblies played in communal prayer time, and "beit midrash" means "house of study." More than simple wrote learning, "Midrash" is the Jewish practice of interacting with the text of Scripture, questioning and even critiquing it, finding space for multiple views and interpretations to exist with each other. So it is then that these three roles are taken up by the church assembly, gathering together as a group, joining in prayer, and studying the scripture.

Church as a house of assembly

In Matthew 18:19-20, we are told that Jesus states wherever his followers gather, even if it's only two of them, he would be there. Such a teaching would have no doubt been reassuring to an early church still trying to find its own identity. As the early Christians worked to navigate their lives alongside their own Jewish communities, Church assembly became the opportunity to solidify their own identity in much the same way that early synagogues served Jewish communities living in exile. As the church began to expand outside of Jewish communities to include neighboring Samaritans and Gentiles, the church assembly became increasingly crucial in solidifying this new identity. As Paul states in his letter to the Galatians, these Christians were no longer distinctly "Jew" or "Greek," not even separated as "male" or "female," rather their identity as "Christian" was now their primary way of seeing themselves. Neither Paul nor these early Christians literally believed that they physically morphed to lose those old characteristics, rather that their new identity as Christian superseded these other categories. Regular attendance in Church assembly would help solidify this for them both intellectually and socially. Slaves and slave owners were forced to begin to live in community side by side, as Paul's short letter to Philemon on behalf of the slave Onesimus shows.   Contrary to some modern interpreters, the early church also allowed for a shockingly egalitarian life for women and men within the church, setting aside many culture norms to work together in building the Christian community.

In much the same way, our church association serves to help us to remember our own identities separated from the outside world. It is where we must demand that we have equal familial ties with those we may not otherwise come into contact with. What's crucial here is that in order for such an assembly to work, we must turn the organizational hierarchies of the outside world on their heads. Jesus gives us a powerful look at what this order must look like when he says "whoever wants to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be your slave" (Matthew 20:26-28) If we live as an isolated community in exile in the empire of this world, we cannot have true equality in our church assemblies unless we are actively working against the power structures of the world we live in.

An incredible illustration of what this can look like can be found in the current work on the concept of "Anti-racism." A full examination of this concept and how it relates to the church honestly is best left to a longer entry of its own, but for momentary illustration, the idea of anti-racism is that if you are working to develop a family or community free of racism, you cannot simply be "not racist." Racism is so insidiously designed into the fabric of our culture that in order to truly be free of it, you much be "anti-racist." That is, consciously working against the racist tendencies of our culture. (To learn more, here is a short interview with Ibram Kendi on the concept, and a full book if you want to dig even deeper)

In the same way, if we want our church assemblies to be free of sexism, homophobia, classism, or any other broken hierarchy of power we find in the outside world, our own communities cannot simply ignore those issues, we much work to be truly "anti-world." That's why in an extended passage, the writer of the book of James tells us that preferred treatment of the rich should be specifically banned in the church. (James 2:1-13) While as the outside world trains us from birth to view the accumulation of money and power as the ultimate measure of success in one's life, the Kingdom of God calls us to turn that judgement on its head. Indeed, as he says earlier in the same letter, the writer of James tells us "Believers in humble circumstances ought to take pride in their high position. But the rich should take pride in their humiliation—since they will pass away like a wild flower." (James 1:9-10)

Overall, this purpose of our churches, to be our bulwark in the building of our Christian identity, is the one that likely takes the most careful thought and consideration. But it is not the only purpose the church has taken on.

Church as a house of prayer

What does it mean to pray? Jesus instructed his disciples not to do so in public, for others to see (Matthew 6:5) but we still see prayer as a regular part of the life of the early church, as already demonstrated in the passage from Acts mentioned earlier. The term "prayer" here can be misleading, as we may assume it simply refers to the act of bowing ones head and reciting a short litany of both requests and praises, and while that practice is crucial, it is not the sole practice that is entailed with Scriptural discussions of "prayer." The Hebrew word "t'filah" can be more broadly understood as "worship," though even that word falls short since we've often come to associate it solely with musical participation in the service. The act of being a "House of Prayer" is an act of drawing the community together in connection with God. When he cleansed the Temple grounds in Matthew 21, Jesus specifically quotes a passage from Isaiah, where God predicts a coming time when people from all nations would be drawn together in God's presence to worship, offer sacrifices, and obey the Law of Moses (Isaiah 56: 6-8) and it is that prophetic image we are taking part in. The prayer life of the church is the communal connection with God, much like when the Jewish community camped around Mt Sinai and were in fear because of the power of God on display. We should expect our time in church to include drawing us together in this prayer and worship.

The practice of Communion is one of the most powerful of such expressions, a practice that dates back to the very early days of the church. We join together breaking bread, and in a way we are not only communing with God, but also with each other, and even with the church as a whole, as we share a meal that's found in every expression of the Faith, and dates back to almost two thousand years to the church's founding. In addition to the reference to breaking bread found in our earlier Acts 2 passage, we also see reference to the practice of communion mentioned in Acts 20:7 and 1 Corinthians 11:17-34 (indeed, much of 1 Corinthians is spent discussing the practice) indicating the centrality of communion for the early church.

Reading of the Psalms would have also been a part of early church services, as they sang these ancient songs, looking for the Messianic interpretations to be found in them. Passages like Ephesians 5:19 and Colossians 3:16 make it fairly clear that music played a part in these church prayer services going back to a very early date.

Church as house of midrash

When I was in Bible college, it was often popular to teach Biblical preaching as starting with a chosen passage of scripture, breaking it down to its component parts, doing a word study of any key words, then developing your sermon as an exposition on the passage with any parallel verses included. This "Bible first" approach to preaching was incredibly dry, but would often be applauded by congregants as "spiritual meat."  Unfortunately, it's an approach that all too easily drifted into making the Bible a purely academic enterprise. I can think of several sermons I heard in those days explaining the construction of a first century home in Jerusalem or the individual pieces of a Roman soldier's armor, but I can't think of near as many preachers talking about the importance of caring for the poor or how the church should be engaged in peace building activities. We were trained to see the Bible as a text to be taught, and while we might go over ways to make our sermons engaging and entertaining, there was little to no room left for how we should use them to connect people to the scriptures themselves or the God who inspired them. (the fact that said college also avowed that the Holy Spirit was no longer miraculously active in our world today likely played a part in this)

The Hebrew practice of "midrash" is more than the cold and calculating  approach delivered in Bible college. Rather than seeing Scripture as a formula to work through then explain the correct answer to your congregation, midrash requires that you engage not only with the passage itself, but also with the long tradition of other scholars who have also engaged with it before you. It's accepted that not everyone has to agree on an individual verse's meaning, and indeed disagreement is encouraged. It's believed that by engaging the scriptures in community, we are drawn far closer to the truth of what the passages entail than we would simply by reading alone. We even see this practice preserved in the selections of the Christian New Testament, with multiple versions of the Gospel story preserved, many of the passages in which are found to be contradictions. While much of the Christian texts we've saved are written by Paul, a missionary who espoused the Gospel as being purely grace by faith, we also have a letter claiming to be by James which responds that faith without works is dead.

I know many of my former fellow students who were burnt out on church years after leaving college (one of the hardest tests of your faith would be to work for a church) and instead they simply tune in to watch video teaching by preachers they respect, or read books by learned scholars, digging further into the scriptures and they believe this should be sufficient over going to a church, at least for a time. While I would agree, it can sometimes be healthy to step away and take some time alone, I think we put ourselves in a dangerous practice when we lean on these one-way sources for our scripture learning. True engagement with the Bible should require the ability to talk back. To ask hard questions. To push and pull on the meaning and application of the verses being discussed, and that can be hard to do if we are learning in isolation. It is crucial that teaching should not come from only one voice, and ideally a variety of experiences should be included. Do you have both women and men teaching in your church? Do you have different racial backgrounds included in your teaching team? What is the age range of your teachers? The more we create an environment to encourage engagement by the whole assembly, the closer we are able to get to true midrash, and the closer, I think, we get to connecting with the God we are supposed to serve.

I truly hope I have not left anyone with the imagined conclusion that this is an exhaustive explanation of the purpose of church. Indeed, there are many activities which I believe are necessary for the church to take part in that are not explicitly stated here, such as serving the community and grappling with the question of evangelism. However, I do hope I've given a strong explanation for what I feel should be the foundational principles for church life and attendance. I believe that these other expressions of the church actually spring out of some of these basic questions, but it is my dearest hope that I've offered you a variety of directions to consider and discuss from yourself. I have no doubt there are items you may think I've missed or priorities I've taken up that you believe should be reduced. By all means, engage. Share your own thoughts with me. Let us join together, worship, and think.