Most people don't want a weekly church service
Pastors desperately need to stop measuring the effectiveness or quality of the church by Sunday attendance.
The majority of people don't seem to want or need what's offered at a weekly church service. And I've learned that that's okay. Pastors desperately need to stop measuring the effectiveness or quality of the church by Sunday attendance.
What I think people do need are communities of practice and belonging. That may not look like a typical Sunday service. And that's okay. But a life devoid of any commitments to people outside of your family or most convenient relationships will not go far.
Pastor Shared Yadav shared a bunch of reasons to join a church. The following are direct quotes:
- To join a church is to commit to a social circle you do not get to choose and can therefore show you whether your spirituality is bullshit or not
- Joining a church is a way of practicing - among a small group of people over a significant period of time - what you'd like the world to be like
- To join a church is to live in rebellion against the neoliberal and capitalist forces which are brainwashing you into making your consumer desire the center of the world, reducing all your experiences of the world (including all the people in it) to instruments and resources.
- To join a church is to resist all traditional loyalties to state, party, culture, family or affinity in an act of loyalty to a group that transcends all natural categories
- Joining a church organizes your financial priorities around supporting an inclusive community for vulnerable people . . . that you actually have to live with.
- Joining a church is a way of maintaining healthy skepticism about human knowledge and capacities in the language of divine mystery.