What's the purpose of going to church? Why do you go to church?
I've been thinking about this lately - mostly due to my own curiosity, and definitely because it clearly has a different meaning and purpose in my life than in the life of other people who attend my church.
There are a bunch of people who seem to follow the vitamin/exercise philosophy of church: i.e. "Church is Good For Me, But I Don't Really Like It." They show up most Sundays because they think it's good for them, but they don't particularly enjoy it, and they're out the door as fast as possible after services. These are not the kind of people who drop by between Sundays, or volunteer for church events. Like running on a treadmill, they just want the service to be over so they can go home and watch football, or go to the mall, or whatever. (Lots of men in this category)
I suspect that there's a big spectrum for church-goers, so I'm really curious about what it means, and why people go - or don't go - to church.
I started going to St. Paul's, and now NECL, because I wanted a bigger community and a place with some infrastructure where I could try to focus some energy on helping other people. I started with helping at Community Dinners and with Children's Sabbath. It's also a focus (and locus?) of many of the things that Jennifer and I do together.
NECL is part of who I am and how I spend my time. I hope that my participation is a manifestation of my values. NECL helps me examine my values and think about what it means to live on this earth at this time in history.
This is part of why I go to church.
Why do you go? Or, why don't you go?
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Some very belated comments: I had teh opportunity yesterday, at a pre-Synod Assembly meeting, to answer the question "What brought you to your church?" I had to explain this to one of my table mates, someone I'd not met before. We had a good laugh over the answer, since she and I both came to our churches by way of employment -- she is the music director at her church, and was lured there away from another church position; she has since become a member, and those folks are her support network and her community. That's a good outline of my story as well, though I had never been a member of any church before I started my job at St. Paul's. I had wanted a church, off and on, for a long time. My conceptualization then of what church should be included a caring community of individuals with similar values; united by a hopeful belief system, something philosophically larger than any one organization or social justice concern. I've always been defined in large part by my employment, and I wanted to feel myself included in something larger than that framework. I had to clear a number of other hurdles, it seems, before I was really ready for it, however. Part of a much longer story. I stay now for all the reasons I stated above, as well as for my job. And for other reasons that I couldn't have anticipated.
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