Hi there, I've not been to church in six months or more, and wondering if it would be beneficial to my faith and relationship with God if i went to a church.
Would anyone here care to share their experience of going to church and how it benefits their faith and relationship with God?
Many thanks Lenno
If you are only looking for Christian answers, there is a Christian-only board for these kinds of questions. As such you will get a very diverse set of opinions here.
But, since I am a Christian, I will give you what I believe to be the Christian answer:
Yes, yes it would be beneficial. Christianity is not practiced alone, our relationship with God is not a privatized experience of God by ourselves apart from the rest of the Body of Christ. Christianity is practiced, believed, confessed, and lived within communion with others.
The chief benefit of regular attendance is that it is at our coming together that we receive the means of God's grace: Word and Sacrament. It is when we come together that God's word is preached, that Christ's Supper is celebrated, where our baptism is affirmed and re-affirmed. Here is where God meets us in His grace to create, work, and strengthen our faith. Where the word is preached and the Sacraments administered, there is Christ present even as He promised, "Where two or three are gathered in My name, I am there". To gather in Christ's name is to gather for the purpose of hearing, abiding, confessing, and receiving His word.
Consistently throughout Scripture we see that God's power and work isn't through a purely "personal relationship", but rather the common fellowship of all God's people with one another abiding in God. Here, in this fellowship, this communion of faith, God meets us. God meets us with one another, because even as God is for us in Christ, so are we for one another in Christ; Christ is the meeting place of God and man. Recall where it is written, there is one mediator between God and human beings, and that's Jesus (1 Timothy 2:5). Recall that Jesus Himself spoke of Himself as the Temple of God, and this language of being God's Temple is extended also to the Church, corporately, as well as we ourselves individually. Thus it is ourselves, together, in Christ, and Christ in us and with us, through this mystical communion as the Church, that is the Temple of God. And the means with which God uses to bring us together, to call us His own, to keep us in Christ are the simple gifts of Word and Sacrament; for here we hear the Good Shepherd's voice who says to us, "I will give you rest", here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world as He comes to us in the simple and ordinary elements of bread and wine in His Supper. Here we confess our faith, are strengthened with faith by God's grace, here God calls and unites us together, and we are the Body of Jesus Christ. For God has taken, from many, one new people, a new man in Christ. Which is why there is no longer "Jew nor Greek, male nor female, bondservant nor freeman, barbarian nor Scythian, circumcised nor uncircumcised" for there is only the one new creation in Christ.
It is good to read the Scriptures on our own, but that is never a substitute for church. It is good to remember that up until the invention of the printing press nobody had easy access to books of any kind. Books had to be hand-copied, and thus books could only be found in libraries and universities, even the incredibly wealthy would be extremely fortunate to own their own books. So how did the majority of Christians experience the Bible? At church. The translation of the Bible in the West into the common languages was not so much that each person could own their own copy of the Bible and try and interpret it for themselves, but that they could hear it in their own language at church, since the Bible existed (in the West) almost exclusively in Latin.
So we should consider private Bible ownership a luxury, because in the grand scope of history, it is. But the books of the Bible themselves were written not to us as individuals, but for us corporately, that we should corporately benefit from them. Through faithful preaching and teaching. The books of the Bible assembled together into a cohesive Canon of Scripture (the word "Bible" comes from the Latin biblia, meaning "books", plural rather than singular, as the Bible is not a book, but a collection of many books), this was done chiefly for the purpose of having the same books read when we came together to hear and read them, that is, "going to church". But the intent, from the time of Christ and the Apostles, and the practice for the last two thousand years, has always been that we are Christians together, we receive, hear, and abide in the Scriptures together, we are edified and strengthened, and nourished by God through His word together.
The Bible is not for you, or for me; but for
us. Christian life, Christian practice, Christian discipleship: these are all things we inhabit together, with one another, as the Church together.
-CryptoLutheran
