What if being at church every Sunday was the default?
How often would you guess you make it to church? Go on, actually have a guess! Most of us have a rough sense: pretty often, most Sundays, unless something gets in the way.
Recently I looked through our attendance patterns, and it challenged that impression a little. Only about 30% of people who call City on a Hill home make it to church three out of four Sundays (this used to be the standard definition of regular attendance).
Numbers never tell the whole story. People get sick, travel, work Sundays, carry heavy caring loads, or have only recently joined City on a Hill. And church attendance isn't a scorecard for how much someone loves Jesus.
But the numbers did make me wonder whether many of us are less regular than we imagine. And this cause me to reflect on whether that's partly because of how we've come to think about turning up on a Sunday.
For many of us, the default question has become: "Is anything else happening this Sunday?" If not, we go to church.
What if we flipped it? What if church were already fixed in the diary, and the question became: "How do I build this weekend around being at church?"
That's a small shift in thinking, but I suspect it could be a big shift in life.
Because the Bible's picture of church is richer than an event we attend when the calendar's clear. I was reading these words from Peter this morning:
"You also, like living stones, are being built into a spiritual house to be a holy priesthood" (1 Peter 2:5).
Two pictures at once - stones in the house and priests serving within it. In the Old Testament, priests didn't just come to the tabernacle to receive - they carried responsibility for its worship and life.
Peter says: that's us now, together.
Which means when we gather, we're not merely asking, "What will I get out of this?" We come to serve. We come to help make church, church.
So your voice singing beside someone matters. Your conversation with the person sitting alone matters. Your encouragement to a tired parent matters. Your prayer for someone who's struggling matters. Your welcome to someone new matters. Simply being there matters more than you realise.
So perhaps the better question isn't, "Do I have to go to church?" but, "If Jesus loves his church this much, how do I arrange my life around it?"
That might mean making your plans to coming home from holidays on Saturday night instead of Sunday afternoon. Or organising a lunch instead of brunch with friends. Or not committing to something that will mean you regularly miss church. Or building Sunday into our plans before the bookings are made, not after. (I love seeing people who can't make their own congregation attend another instead.)
Not because missing a week makes God love us any less.
But because these are our people. These are the people God has given us to encourage, serve, and be loved by in return.
Hebrews puts it like this: "not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another — and all the more as you see the Day approaching" (Hebrews 10:25). We gather because others need us there and because we need them too.
So here's a small experiment: look at your diary for the next couple of months and put church in first. There will be Sundays when you can't make it. But let showing up be the plan, rather than the weekly question.
Because church isn't just somewhere we go.
By God's grace, it's a people we belong to.
Grace & peace,
Andrew