3 reasons why you should get off the sofa and go back to physical church
By Ryan Diaz — reposted from Premier Christianity blog
Are you wondering why you should start going back to a physical church? After all COVID has given us back a lot of free time right? Here’s what Ryan Diaz says:
If we can consume the word and worship from the comfort of our home, why do we need to make the trek back to our pews?.… After a year of lockdown, what are the spiritual benefits of emerging from our bubbles? …
In our Western capitalist system, we are trained to think like consumers. All around us, companies cater to our likes and dislikes. Algorithms curate content to suit our persuasions, and as a result, we look at life through the lens of what is best for us.
Our society deludes itself into believing that life is fundamentally about ourselves by putting the consumer in the enter of the universe. We approach church like consumers and make the entire experience about what we like and dislike — lockdown has exacerbated this reality. If the sermon is dull or the worship not to our liking, we no longer have to the hard work of leaving a church. Instead, all we have to do is go to YouTube to find an experience that satisfies us.
This is why we need to regather for worship. Worshipping together in a gathered community forces us to decenter ourselves. CS Lewis famously wrote:
“When I first became a Christian, about fourteen years ago, I thought that I could do it on my own, by retiring to my rooms and reading theology, and I wouldn’t go to the churches and Gospel Halls; … I disliked very much their hymns, which I considered to be fifth-rate poems set to sixth-rate music. But as I went on I saw the great merit of it. I came up against different people of quite different outlooks and different education, and then gradually my conceit just began peeling off. I realised that the hymns (which were just sixth-rate music) were, nevertheless, being sung with devotion and benefit by an old saint in elastic-side boots in the opposite pew, and then you realise that you aren’t fit to clean those boots. It gets you out of your solitary conceit.”
You can read the whole of Ryan’s article here: