Hard Questions: Why bother with Church at all?

It's a fair question, and more people are asking it than ever. A third of Americans who attended church before the pandemic have not returned. Among adults under thirty, the numbers are steeper. "Spiritual but not religious" has become its own category — people who believe in something, who pray, who care about meaning and ethics and transcendence, but who have decided they can pursue all of that without sitting in a building on Sunday morning with people they didn't choose.

The case for that decision is not nothing. Churches have done serious harm. Many of them are boring, insular, or consumed with their own institutional survival. You can read theology at home. You can serve your community without a congregation. You can have spiritual experiences in nature, in music, in silence, in the company of people you actually love. The question is not stupid.

If what you're looking for is a weekly dose of inspiration, a comfortable social circle, or a place to feel spiritually nourished without much cost, the case for church is weak. There are better options. A good therapist, a committed group of friends, a practice of meditation or contemplative prayer — any of these will do more for your inner life than a congregation you attend passively and leave without connection.

The case for church is not that it's the best available provider of spiritual goods. The case is that it's trying to do something different — something that can't be done alone, and that doesn't reduce to personal wellbeing.

In May 2023, the U.S. Surgeon General issued an advisory declaring loneliness a public health crisis. About half of American adults were reporting loneliness before the pandemic. The pandemic deepened it. Young people aged fifteen to twenty-four experienced a seventy percent drop in time spent with friends over the previous two decades. Loneliness increases the risk of premature death by nearly thirty percent — comparable to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day — and elevates risk for cardiovascular disease, dementia, depression, and anxiety.

Human beings are not designed for isolation. And one of the things church has always offered — when it is working — is a community of people who see each other consistently, who know each other's names and histories, who show up at the hospital and the graveside and the meal after the funeral, who are in relationship not because they happen to share interests but because they made a promise to be.

That is a rarer thing than it sounds. Most of the institutions that used to provide it — the union hall, the civic lodge, the neighborhood that stayed put — have thinned out or disappeared. The church remains one of the few places in American life where a seventy-year-old and a twenty-five-year-old might sit in the same room regularly, where someone who just moved to town is welcomed into an existing web of care, where the belonging isn't contingent on performance or productivity.

Paul's central image for the church in his letters is the body — not a voluntary association of like-minded people, not a spiritual support group, but a single organism in which every part is necessary, in which the suffering of one member is felt by the whole, in which the gifts of each are given not for the member's own benefit but for the functioning of the whole. "If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it" (1 Corinthians 12:26).

This means that Christian faith is not, at its core, a relationship between an individual and God that happens to sometimes occur in a group setting. The community is not optional packaging around a private spiritual experience. The community is the thing. You cannot be the body of Christ alone, any more than a hand can be a hand when it's detached from the body.

The belonging church offers is not supposed to be the warm, frictionless belonging of people who already agree with each other. It is the harder, stranger belonging of people who did not choose each other, who come from different places and hold different views, who are bound together not by affinity but by the same baptismal promise. That kind of belonging — across difference, across life stage, across the fractures that divide most communities — is the specific witness the church is called to make. It is also what the Surgeon General says is most lacking and most needed.

Stanley Hauerwas has argued that the primary social task of the church is to be the church — to be a community that embodies, however imperfectly, a different way of organizing human life. Not a chaplaincy to the surrounding culture, not a vendor of religious goods and services to spiritual consumers, but a distinct community with its own practices, its own story, its own account of what matters and why. The church doesn't exist to make individuals feel better. It exists to be a sign — to show the world, by how it lives, that another way of being human is possible.

Most congregations fall short of this regularly, including this one. But the vision names something you cannot reach alone. You can have a profound relationship with God alone. You cannot practice forgiveness of enemies alone. You cannot bear one another's burdens alone. You cannot share bread and cup with people you didn't choose alone. The practices that form Christian character — not just the beliefs but the habits, the disciplines, the actual shape of a life — require other people, and require them consistently and over time.

The liturgy is part of this argument, not decoration around it.

Every Sunday in this church, people who are grieving and people who are celebrating stand in the same room and say the same words. People who voted differently, who disagree about things that matter, who would not have chosen each other, pass the peace. People who don't believe everything they're saying out loud say it anyway — because the practice of saying it shapes us toward belief more reliably than waiting until we believe before we speak. The liturgy does not require you to have your inner life sorted before you participate. It meets you where you are and pulls you, slowly, toward something larger than you came in with.

The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre argued that virtues — courage, justice, honesty, compassion — are not cultivated in isolation. They are cultivated inside communities that practice them, that tell stories about them, that hold each other accountable to them over time. The Christian liturgy is exactly this — a repeated, embodied, communal enactment of a story about who we are, whose we are, and how we are supposed to live. You cannot get this from a podcast.

None of which means the particular congregation you tried, or left, or were harmed by, was the right place. It might not have been. The church in its institutional form has repeatedly failed to be what the theology says it is. The gap between what the body of Christ is supposed to be and what any given congregation actually is can be enormous. If you walked away because you were hurt, or bored, or because the community was more interested in its own survival than in the people it kept failing — that is a reasonable response to a real failure.

The question is whether the failure of particular congregations is a reason to abandon the thing itself, or a reason to look harder for a community that is actually trying to be it. That's a question only you can answer, and the answer will depend on what you've been through and what you have left to risk.

What I can tell you is what we are trying to be here — a place where the distance between the theology and the practice is at least taken seriously, where the failure to close that gap is named rather than managed, and where the table is set for people who are still figuring out whether they believe any of it. If that is enough to make it worth trying, the door is open.

Where are you with this today? Maybe you've been doing fine without church and you're not sure this article has changed anything. Maybe you've been wanting to come back but something keeps stopping you — the memory of a wound, the fear of being disappointed again, the inertia of a life that has organized itself around other things. Whatever brought you to this question, the tradition's answer is not that you owe attendance to an institution. It's that the particular things church makes possible — bearing one another's burdens, practicing forgiveness with people you didn't choose, being known across time by people who will show up at the graveside — are worth whatever the cost of showing up turns out to be. Most weeks. Not every week. But most.

Sources and further reading: 1 Corinthians 12:12-27; Hebrews 10:24-25 (NRSV). U.S. Surgeon General, "Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation: The U.S. Surgeon General's Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community" (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2023). Stanley Hauerwas and William H. Willimon, Resident Aliens: Life in the Christian Colony (Abingdon Press, 1989). Stanley Hauerwas, A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic (University of Notre Dame Press, 1981). Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (University of Notre Dame Press, 1981). Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together (Harper & Row, 1954). The Book of Common Prayer (1979), "An Outline of the Faith," pp. 845-862.