Maybe you’ve heard the following joke:
One Sunday morning, a mother went in to wake her son and tell him it was time to get ready for church, to which he replied, “I’m not going.” “Why not?” she asked. “I’ll give you two good reasons,” he said. “One, they don’t like me, and two, I don’t like them.” His mother replied, “I’ll give you two good reasons why you should go to church. One, you’re 54 years old, and two, you’re the priest!”
Yes, even clergy have those moments when it seems more appealing to pull the covers up and steal a few more precious moments of sleep than to “go to church.”
And yet, that familiar phrase, “going to church,” may point to part of a deeper problem.
For many, church has come to feel like one activity among many, one destination among others: we go to the bank, go to the store, go to a game… and, if it suits us, we go to church. But from the beginning of the Christian faith, “Church” has meant something far more.
In the New Testament, Church is not primarily a place we go, but a people who are gathered. More to the point, it is a people gathered by God. The initiative does not rest with us. God is the one who calls, who draws, who brings people together so that, together, they may become something in and for the world.
The apostle Paul gives this vision its most powerful expression in the image of the Church as the Body of Christ. Across the centuries, Christians have returned to that image again and again, along with others like it: a family, a community, a spiritual house built of “living stones.” (1 Peter 2:5) Each points to the same truth: the Church is not a static institution or a weekly appointment, but a living, breathing reality, an organic gathering that owes its existence to the One who gathers.
This is why the absence of gathering in our time matters more than we might think. When gathering becomes occasional or optional, something essential is diminished, not only in our own lives, but in the life we share with one another.
Some of these thoughts found their way into my annual message to the congregations in the Parish of Salvage, where I currently serve. Here is a brief excerpt:
“…gathering for worship has always been more than attending an event. It is an act of care for one another. The Letter to the Hebrews urges Christians to meet together so that they may ‘encourage one another.’ Often, we do not know who needed to see us that day – or whom we needed to see—until we arrive.”
You may be reading this on a weekday. But even now, God is at work, drawing you and others together for that shared encounter with the risen Christ. And when Sunday comes, we do not simply go. We are gathered.
Someone may be waiting for your presence… though neither of you knows it yet.
