Church Attendance: Big Deal?

by Greg Smith on July 2nd, 2011

So often in evangelicalism in the pursuit of a Christian's walk, the pendulum swing of ideology and methodology is so dramatic that it often hurts more than it lifts up. Instead of reaching a "middle", that is the true center of the issue or its intended result, extremes are instead the landing point in which people make it their "hill to die on"

Church attendance in the life of the individual Christian, I believe, is one of those issues. The extremes will most likely be heard as (from my own encounters and others as well), "if you don't go to church you are not saved/care"; the opposite extreme being, "I don't need/want to go to church because I already love God and don't need the church." Those who hold to the first extreme need to be reminded of the legalism of their position and works-based righteousness that they are implying (something Jesus spoke against). Those who hold to the position that fits the second extreme, they have to be reminded that they fail to recognize the pride in their position as well as the numerous parts of Scripture that point to the necessity and blessing of the local body of believers (the church) to which they are called to be part of, learn from, live with, and serve together (something Jesus also spoke about).

So how important is church attendance? B.B. Warfield (principal of Princeton Seminary from 1887 to 1921) spoke about it in a convicting way...

B.B. Warfield, Selected Shorter Writings (P&R, 1970), 1:421–422:

"If ever there was one who might justly plead that the common worship of the community had nothing to offer him it was the Lord Jesus Christ. But every Sabbath found him seated in his place among the worshipping people, and there was no act of stated worship, which he felt himself entitled to discard.

Even in his most exalted moods, and after his most elevating experiences, he quietly took his place with the rest of God’s people, sharing with them in the common worship of the community. Returning from that great baptismal scene, when the heavens themselves were rent to bear him witness that he was well pleasing to God; from the searching trials of the wilderness, and from that first great tour in Galilee, prosecuted, as we are expressly told, “in the power of the Spirit”; he came back, as the record tells, “to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and” — so proceeds the amazing narrative — “he entered, as his custom was, into the synagogue, on the Sabbath day.”

“As his custom was!”

Jesus Christ made it his habitual practice to be found in his place on the Sabbath day at the stated place of worship to which he belonged. “It is a reminder,” as Sir William Robertson Nicoll well insists, “of the truth which, in our fancied spirituality, we are apt to forget — that the holiest personal life can scarcely afford to dispense with stated forms of devotion, and that the regular public worship of the church, for all its local imperfections and dullness, is a divine provision for sustaining the individual soul.”

“We cannot afford to be wiser than our Lord in this matter. If any one could have pled that his spiritual experience was so lofty that it did no require public worship, if any one might have felt that the consecration and communion of is personal life exempted him from what ordinary mortals needed, it was Jesus. But he made no such plea. Sabbath after Sabbath even he was found in the place of worship, side by side with God’s people, not for the mere sake of setting a good example, but for deeper reasons. Is it reasonable, then, that any of us should think we can safely afford to dispense with the pious custom of regular participation with the common worship of our locality?”

Is it necessary for me to exhort those who would fain be like Christ, to see to it that they are imitators of him in this?"

Question is... how important is it to you? Will you see the importance of church attendance not rooted in the mere being there but in being part of the body to worship and be instructed? Will you realize the importance and no longer excuse yourself because, "I don't need to go"? My prayer is that Sunday will be a day you look forward to with expectation to meet again together as the church to worship powerfully in the Spirit a God who is more than worthy of your attendance, your humility, and your devotion.

 

For His Glory!

Greg