why go to church, anyway

I've been avoiding answering this one for three months

Over the summer, sojourning briefly in some hot red states, I got this question repeatedly from people who in our past lives had been “on fire for God.” Why should I go (back) to church? There were variations: along with “Why should I go to church?” (if I give money away, and read Christian books, and listen to sermons on podcasts, and pray, and send my kids to Christian school, and am surrounded by Christians in every part of my daily life, then why do I need church on Sunday mornings?) there was also “How did you manage to stay in church?” (after all the hypocrisy and betrayal and judgementalism and partisan politics)¹; and then I also heard, “I guess I would go back to church if I found a church that actually helped us.”

When I asked “Why did you stop going to church?” on Instagram

When I asked “Why do you go to church?” on Instagram

My feminist epistemological conviction is that there is no conveyable truth apart from context and relationship and embodied knowledge. And so part of the reason I don’t want to answer these questions here is that it would be better done in person and with specificity. There isn’t one right answer to these questions. But, in the meantime, here are some of the possible answers:

• Some of you shouldn’t go to church, at least for a while! Take a break and heal. No part of me is worried about you or your “eternal destiny.” You don’t have to hold on to God. God holds on to you.

• You probably shouldn’t go to church if you’re going to please an authority figure in your life (though I think it’s ok to go as an expression of love to a partner, even if intellectual assent to the creed isn’t there for you); you shouldn’t go to keep up appearances, or to find clients for your business, or to network, or to try to earn God’s love. If going to church tempts you to believe that by doing so you’re becoming more lovable and deserving, then go for a hike instead, until you find out that God loves you just as much as God ever did.

• Some of you should go to church, but you shouldn’t go to *that* church, not anymore. You shouldn’t go to a church that says you can’t be a Christian unless you vote a certain way. You shouldn’t go to a church that says all people are equal, but some people are more equal than others. You shouldn’t go to a church that says (or even implies) that there’s only one way to live a good Christian life. Etc.

But enough about the why not to go to church. Why go back, having considered all the facts?

Here, in no particular order, are the reasons that I think I would still go to church, even if it wasn’t my job:

• Because it’s what people who want to follow Jesus have been doing since the beginning, and because of that line in Hebrews: Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is; but exhorting one another: and so much the more, as ye see the day approaching.

• To be drawn out of chronos — chronological time, ordered by watches and the sun and the academic calendar and the regimes of the world — and moved into kairos, a deeper time, time spiraling ever more profoundly into the really real, the eternal, the life of Christ that we’re all called into. Sabbath rest is a way of resisting the punch-clock of the marketplace, that system that says time is money and my value lies in my efficiency and productivity. I’m not made to be a cog in a machine. I’m made for rest and worship. Church helps me believe that.

• Not unrelatedly, I come to church to be bored. In most of my life, a million things vie for my attention, and my itchy fingers open one app and close it and open it again, my mind unable to quiet. Church is one of the only places in my life where I can be formed in ways that remind me that I’m more than a consumer in an attention economy. Church is one of the only places where I learn to let go of my own preferences and my need for constant entertainment.

• I come to church to be formed by prayers. When I was in seminary, we gathered every morning for the liturgy of morning prayer in the BCP. The prayers are basically the same every day. Long Scripture passages are read, usually without comment. Part of me loved it, and part of me could barely attend to it at all.

  Praying, I am being made into a person who says things like

  Let not the needy, O Lord, be forgotten; 

  R.    Nor the hope of the poor be taken away. 

  I am being made into a person who cares about those prayers being answered – and maybe who learns to be part of the answer.

• I come to church to be in community with people who are unlike me ( or, as Donna Haraway says, “to make kin in lines of inventive connection”). There is no other place in my life where I come together with so many different kinds of people: people of all ages, backgrounds, political affiliations, socio-economic statuses, neighborhoods, etc etc etc. It’s not a perfect diversity, but it’s still a rare diversity. Where else will I find an eighty year old Republican woman in hose and heels sitting in the same pew as a 35 year old trans deadhead? A man recently out of prison passing the peace with a retired military officer? An autistic tween welcomed as videographer and a five-year-old’s insights into Bible stories treasured and retold? And all this not just once, but week after week after week?
  
  I do not always like being with people who are unlike me; it’s easier to be with people who listen to the same kind of music and read the same kind of books as I do. I do not always like to be with people at all; usually I prefer to be independent and solitary. As Phil Christman said once, though, Christianity is the "inconvenience and annoyance of other people and the terror of being known." The reality is that I am not independent and solitary, and church helps me live into the reality of our damaged humanity and admit my need for help.

• I come to church to be in community with other creatures, too. The dust motes and the way the light through stained glass windows hits them. The zinnias that reseeded themselves from last summer. The split-spined hymnals we hold and the wooden pews that hold us. (One woman told me last week that she comes to church to sit with her teenaged son in the same pew where she used to bounce him on her knee to keep him quiet during the service. The space is sacred. It holds our memories for us, holds us in some outside-of-time love.)

  

  
  

• To find stabilizing rituals for my week, and for the beginning and the middle and the end of life. Relatedly, to be around people who are newly born and people who will soon die, and people who are already dead but still join us in prayer.

• To be reminded that reality is more than material, that the world is enchanted.

• To be carried by the faith of others when my faith fails; to be given words to say when my words fail. To look around and see other people who I know from long years of relationship have endured through worse, and to be encouraged by their faith.

• To become friends with God. Lauren writes about this strange notion in Wearing God, and quotes the 4th century preacher John Chrysostom, who says one way to pursue our own friendship with God is to pursue friendship with the people who are already God’s friends. And those people are especially the saints and the poor. When we pray with the saints – that is, in part, when we come to church and pray with each other – and when we practice hospitality and generosity and share meals with the poor, we are practicing becoming friends of God. 
  
  Lauren also notes the way that natural affections can be supported by institutions and the structures they provide. Remember how much easier it was to make friends when you lived in a dorm, and there were people down the hall and people in your classes and clubs who you’d see on a regular basis without having to make plans or juggle calendars? Or how much easier it is to stay friends with someone who is also a colleague – someone with whom you’re regularly thrown together for meetings or planning sessions? Or someone whose kids are in the same classes as yours? Institutions help nurture friendships that have been sparked by natural affection. Similarly, our friendship with God is nurtured by the institution and structures of the church, as it gives us ways to pray and eat and volunteer together.

• Because I believe that we understand scripture best in community, not in individual study.

• To be in a place where I and my family are loved unconditionally. (No church will do this perfectly, but if you don’t feel at least some sense of God’s unconditional love at your church, that’s a red flag.)

• To stay free from the tyranny of money and from the belief that I am in control. Tithing acknowledges that all I am and all I have belongs to God, and that we belong to each other. I don’t exist as an independent, autonomous agent. My life is bound up with yours.

• To be present with the Body of Christ, and to receive the Body of Christ, the real presence in the Eucharist. Or, as my grandma said when I asked her why she goes to church: To be with Jesus.

Maybe it would be possible to patch together a series of activities and communities that could offer me all this. We could walk the same wooded trails every week, read poetry, practice sabbath outside of a religious context, give away chunks of our money to those in need, and work to form communities that remind us of our diversity and our interdependence. We could try to recreate some sacred ritual and community for ourselves, thinking we can do it in a way that’s less damaging and more perfect than church.

Or we could do what humans have done for thousands of years, though poorly. Go back to church. Sit shoulder to shoulder with people we might not choose as our neighbors. Acknowledge our interconnectedness and the difficulty of it. Organize. Share money and meals. Feed the hungry, welcome the immigrant, protest injustice, visit the sick and imprisoned. Pray prayers that reinforce the beliefs we have a hard time living. Be bored together, and delighted together. Sing together. And then go in peace, to love and serve.

Or, you could go because AOC said to.

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Pleasures:

• Sarah Bessey, “It’s No Small Thing”:
  ”On Sunday last, we stood in church and I listened to my row of tall children sing the old songs I’ve loved my whole life long. We’re still here, I guess I just love being part of a congregation. I don’t know what I’m doing most of the time and I’m a bit overwhelmed by the trying, so we just show up to church and we sing. We pray together for the world. My middles adore their youth leader and never miss a Wednesday. I think I’m trying to help my children see that another world is still possible, that there is hope even when it feels like so many are choosing fear and despair and distrust and scapegoats. I’m trying to keep singing when the darkness is gathering, I hope they remember what my voice sounds like at night.”

• Jack’s songs are on Spotify now. Add them to your playlists!

• Another album on repeat for me is English folk singer Laura Marling’s new Patterns in Repeat, about motherhood and relationships

• I’m trying to avoid amazon entirely with my gift giving this Christmas, and trying to buy local to support businesses that might not survive Helene! Amanda Held Opelt created a helpful Southern Appalachia gift guide.

• I don’t know if Shrinking, on Apple TV, is actually a good show, but I do know that it’s easy to watch. The actors give great performances, even if (like Ted Lasso???) the writing tends to skirt too lightly over real trauma in favor of feel-good moment.

• The Good Whale, about the real life of the whale who played “Free Willy,” is the podcast I am happily listening to while I sew these days.

• I have a sinus infection, or something, and so yesterday I stayed in bed and read The Education of Harriet Hatfield . Previously, I’d only read Sarton’s poetry, and while I wouldn’t say the prose is anything special — the characters are a little wooden — I found this to be an interesting window into the women’s movement in the 1980s, and still relevant in the way it talks about privilege and prejudice and power.

• Postelection Pre-exhaustion: The Trump barrage begins again.
  “The best kind of political engagement strengthens bonds among neighbors, co-workers, and co-congregants; it cultivates belonging and agency. The worst sort is entirely mediated by the pageantry of Washington, D.C., allowing the latest palace intrigue — who’s up, who’s down, who’s about to be knifed — to keep us frantically engaged.”

• I deleted more than a decade’s worth of tweets last week, deactivated my account, and moved to Bluesky. I’m @amypete there, if you would like to connect.

Dangerous Territory is now available in an updated second edition and as an audiobook! Buy it in paperback or ebook at Bookshop, Amazon, or Barnes and Noble.
Where Goodness Still Grows is available wherever books are sold.

1. (and part of the answer to that is that I left the evangelical church years before the apocalypse of the 2010s, and so when it happened, I was already in a church that, though imperfect, did ordain women and marry gay people and encourage questions and offer asylum and believe black lives mattered and pray together and take Scripture seriously and visit the imprisoned and soak in sacramental mystery and feed the hungry and believe in christus victor)