I’ve seen a lot of things recently pointing to the decline in church attendance. It seems that people just don’t attend church services like they used to. As I thought about this development, I began to wonder why people actually attend church in the first place. As I researched the reasons for attending church, I was surprised by what I found.
In a recent poll conducted by PEW Research, Americans gave their reasons for attending church. The full poll results can be found here, if you are interested in diving deeper into the study. Here are the top 3 reasons Americans gave for attending church, according to the poll:
- To become closer to God (81%)
- So children will have a moral foundation (69%)
- To make me a better person (68%)
What surprised me about the poll results was that none of the reasons given are biblical reasons for assembling with other Christians in regular church attendance. In fact, I would say that these are 3 reasons you should NOT attend church this Sunday! Here’s why.
1. To Get Closer To God. The overwhelming majority of people said that they attend church to become closer to God. While this is a worthy endeavor, it’s not a reason to attend church. The fact is, God is no more “present” at your church services than he is in your living room, office, or at the ballgame. God is omnipresent, which means that he is everywhere all the time.
Paul tells us in Acts 17:24 that God does not live in temples made by man. Psalm 139:7-12 tells us that God’s presence is everywhere. The danger in attending church to get closer to God is that we tend to overlook God’s presence outside of the church setting. If we’re going to church so that we can become closer to God, the implication is that we can’t (or don’t) become closer to God outside of church.
The convenience in this posture is that we don’t have to claim responsibility for our own spiritual growth. We can place the responsibility for becoming closer to God squarely on the shoulders of the church – or more accurately, the pastor. This is why the number one reason people leave one church to attend another. “I’m not being fed.” But according to scripture, the pastor’s job is to equip you to do the work of the ministry, not feed you (Ephesians 4:16). When we go to church to get closer to God, we neglect our own responsibility to get closer to God in every aspect of our lives, not just on Sundays.
2. So Children Will Have a Moral Foundation. Every Christian parent wants their children to have a moral foundation. This is also a great aspiration and an admirable goal. The Bible says that if we raise our children with Godly principles and values, that these principles and values will remain with them as they grow older. But this is not a reason for going to church. The truth is – it’s not the church’s responsibility to give your children a moral foundation. It’s yours.
The bible makes it clear that it is the responsibility of the parents to give their children a Godly, moral foundation (Genesis 18:19, Ephesians 6:4, Deuteronomy 6:6-7). When we place that responsibility on the church, we again neglect our own biblical responsibility to our children.
The other problem with this reason for attending church is that it just doesn’t work. Studies show that nearly two-thirds of teens drop out of church when they go to college. That means that we’re counting on something with a failure rate of nearly 70% to give our children a moral foundation. Would you fly on an airline that had a 70% chance of crashing? Why then do we place our children’s spiritual future in a system that has considerably more chance of failure than it does of success? If we’re attending church so that our children will have a moral foundation to see them through the rest of their lives, we’re counting on the wrong thing. Instead, we should be doing what the Bible tells us to do. We, as parents, should be raising our children to live moral, godly lives instead of relying on the church to do it.
3. To Make Me a Better Person. Wouldn’t it be great if going to church actually did make us better people? But the truth is, it doesn’t make us better people by default. I’ll give you an example from the Bible. Paul addressed two of his letters to one of the churches he had started. The church on Corinth was apparently quite a mess. In 1 Corinthians, Paul says that they were arguing with each other (1:10-17), They were “worldly” (3:1-22), arrogant (4:18-21), sexually immoral (5:1-5; 6:12-20), and selfish, greedy, gluttons (11:17-34). Going to church certainly didn’t make the Corinthians better people. In fact, they weren’t much different from the people around them who didn’t go to church.
The thing is, the reason that going to church doesn’t make you a better person is because the church is full of, well, people. And chances are, they’re just like you. These people have no power to make you a better person. We’ve kind of come full circle again to the first point. Going to church doesn’t make you a better person. God does. The Holy Spirit working through you does. But we’re still operating under the impression that God lives and operates in the church. And while becoming a better person is not a bad goal, it seems that at least part of the motivation for wanting to become a better person is so that we will be able to enter Heaven. Of course, we all know that being a good person doesn’t gain you entrance into Heaven. Or do we?
The thing that all of these responses have in common is that they are selfish in nature. It’s all about us. About ME. I want to get closer to God. I want MY children to have a moral foundation. I want to be a better person. But going to church isn’t really about us. It’s about God. It’s about serving each other. And instead of the church correcting our wrong thinking, it has played right into the consumerism that drives these reasons. You want to get closer to God? Let us tell you about our worship experience! Your children need to be taught about God. Come to our church because we have a great program for your children! You want to be a better person? We are in the middle of a sermon series designed to make you a better person! And so, we worship God for the feeling we get instead of because of who he is. We pass our children off on others to develop them spiritually instead of owning our biblical responsibility to develop them ourselves. We try to become better people rather than Godly people. We go to church to be spoon fed and served rather than to serve others and be built into the collective Bride of Christ. We go to church as individuals instead of as part of a larger body.
What do you think? Why should we go to church? What is the purpose of attending church? Why do YOU go to church?
