Why Go To Church?
Edward Hopper, Automat, 1927
I’ve been away from my writing for a while. I’ve been busy with any number of matters that put me into a rhythm different from my writing rhythm. But I’ve been thinking a lot about church. If the church is indeed declining in numbers and influence, as so many are arguing, how can this be a good thing for us?
There is a lot of writing going on out there—articles, opinions, books—on one side or the other on this question: Either the church is dead never to rise again; or there is a quiet revival going on with new life breaking out all over the place. My desires actively and eagerly side with the latter, but the evidence can sometimes be demoralizing.
A few days ago I opened Christian Smith’s brand new blockbuster book Why Religion Went Obsolete: The Demise of Traditional Faith in America. Has church become obsolete, he forces us to ask, followed with a flood of statistics? Surely he can’t be right, can he?
There was a time, Smith argues, even up until the 1990s, when traditional American religion appeared to be alive and well. But “the tide has turned.” Religion “has become culturally obsolete.” It is felt “no longer useful.” Something else “has superseded it in function, efficacy, value, or interest.”
But, wait a minute, I find myself muttering: Does God have no say in this bleak picture of decline? What about all those spottings I’ve been seeing, what Peter Berger used to call “signals of transcendence”? I’ve called them moments of illumination. I’ve been hearing from figures like David Brooks, Ross Douthat, Rod Dreher, Peggy Noonan, Charles Taylor, and so many others. Perhaps we are witnessing, I’ve been saying, a culture shift, yes, a quiet revival, something new that God is actually doing. Right now.
This got me to thinking back to Philip Larkin’s poem “Church Going,” published in 1954, which I read long ago as a student, sobered then as I am now. Larkin tells the story of coming upon a small, vacant church, while on a bikeride in the countryside.
Once I am sure there’s nothing going on
I step inside, letting the door thud shut.
Another church: matting, seats, and stone,
And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut
For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff
Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;
And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,
Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off
My cycle-clips in awkward reverence. . . .
All seems vacant, silent, just not very useful. Maybe obsolete? But then,
Back at the door
I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence,
Reflect the place was not worth stopping for. . . .Yet stop I did. . . .
Maybe, the poet surmises, something has happened in church over the centuries that changed people:
A serious house on serious earth it is. . .
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in . . . .
Isn’t this exactly the tone we strike in our modern society? The church may be bordering on obsolete, but don’t we have lingering fears given the consequences? We do indeed live in a serious world. And don’t we yearn to be meaningfully serious in order to address the ache in our souls and the wretchedness in our world?
Don’t we all yearn to grow wise again? Haven’t we lost our way so dangerously without the church? Don’t we long to be more serious as we have watched our deep culture airbrush God out of our consciousness and push so many people into loneliness, despair, addiction, anxiety, fear, and utter lostness? Don’t we need church again? Ponder Hopper’s young woman staring into her coffee cup, one of the saddest pictures ever painted.
I think about genuine worship, where, if done right, we feel so small up against the vastness of our majestic God. We are invited, as in no other place, into reverence. We bow down in confession for what we have done and what we have left undone, and yet we rise forgiven, made whole once again. We feel held in love. We feel bathed in joy.
We walk into the sanctuary worn down a bit until we find all these people singing,
Praise God in his holy place . . .
praise him for his immeasurable greatness. . . .
praise him with tambourines and dancing,
praise him with flute and strings. . . .
Let everything that has breath praise the LORD!
Praise the LORD. Psalms 150
Don’t take this holy place away from us, we cry out. The place where we can we walk in, worn and weary, and walk away refreshed, forgiven, joyous, ready to sing to the immeasurable greatness of the God who surrounds us.