Why Come to Church?

ST. PAULS PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, NAPIER 24/02/08 (am)

WHY COME TO CHURCH?

Reading: John 4:7-25

This morning I want us to ask ourselves a question, which only we can answer: ‘Why do we come to church?’ The reasons may be numerous, and usually involve more than one: ‘Because I always have’. ‘Because I feel I should’. ‘Because I like the people’. All those reasons may be legitimate, and indeed they are, even if differing in value. But I want to suggest that one of our main reasons should be, or could be, because we want to grow in our awareness of God.

Of course not everybody wants to go to church, or even those who do go to church may not want to go all of the time. You may have heard of the mother, who one Sunday morning, went in to wake her son and tell him it was time to get ready for church, to which he replied, “I’m not going.” “Why not?” she asked. “I’ll give you two good reasons,” he said. “(1) they don’t like me, and (2 )I don’t like them.” His mother replied, “I’ll give you TWO good reasons why YOU SHOULD go to church. (1) You’re 59 years old, and (2) you’re the minister!”

We are well aware in terms of church attendance that many of the things we find at church can be found elsewhere. Service isn’t the prerogative of the church. There are many avenues of service in the community. Fellowship isn’t the prerogative of the church. We can find fellowship at groups like Probus or in the local bar. And while habit isn’t a bad thing, generally if we are to keep going we will need a more substantial reason than that.

When Jesus met the woman of Samaria the conversation went somewhere because he spoke to her of spiritual things. Her outward life wasn’t going very well. Her relationships were proving to be a challenge. But that wasn’t where Jesus focussed. He brought her back to the reality of God. He spoke to her of the importance of worshipping God ‘in spirit and in truth‘. (John 4:24). He said that what he could give would be like a ‘spring of water welling up to eternal life’ (v.14). He was talking about the reality of God. It is a good day at church when we go out thinking about God, more aware of the presence of God, trusting more deeply in the upholding grace of God. It may not seem very practical, but that awareness eventually moulds and governs our outward actions and attitudes. It may take time - a long time for some of us - but over time it does come.

The other day I crashed my computer. I have to say ‘I did’, because it was my fault rather than the computers and I lost quite a lot of material. My blood pressure went up and my concentration went down! Eventually the program told me that it was checking the hard disk of the computer - rather like checking a faulty engine in your car - and it gave me a message on the screen that it would do it in three steps. Step one went fine. The second step, I waited and nothing happened. I waited ten minutes and nothing happened. It said 0% progress. I tried it again and again nothing happened. Eventually I just left it - calm like I am now! . About 20 minutes later I passed by the computer and there was a message on the screen saying that step 2 was about 25% done. For a long while there was no indication that anything was happening. There was nothing on the surface, but all the while changes had been going on quietly behind the scenes. It took time, but it largely came right.

That’s how the Spirit of God works. It isn’t that we come to worship one day and in an instant we are changed so that nothing more is required. Spiritual growth is a process, growing in the knowledge and grace of God, just as we grow in every other area of life. Paul says that ‘the Spirit gives life’ (2 Corinthians 3:6a) and gradually changes us (2 Corinthians 3:18), but like the computer the changes come gradually, and often imperceptibly, from within. Nothing much may seem to be happening, but give it time. Man looks at the outside, but God looks at the heart (1 Samuel 16:7)

And as we change within, so gradually it shows in the way we act, the way we treat people, the way we see ourselves. But it is a process.

Growth in goodness, I believe, is also a process. Not our worth. We are of worth from the day we are born because we bear God’s image, but our continuing growth in goodness comes over a period of time. When someone referred to Jesus as good, he said, ‘Why do you call me good? Only God is good’. (Mark 10:18). It isn’t denying there are good people. Hopefully most people are good most of the time. But there are times for most of us when we are less than good. Times when the ‘snarkiness’ creeps in, the petty self-justification, the whining self-pity. It doesn’t take much to change from the good to the not-quite-so-good. I can tell you a crashed computer, like a crashed panel in your car can quickly change your equilibrium! . So goodness is a growing thing, comfortable this day because it suits us, but challenged the next day because of changing circumstances or some irritating people.

The encouraging thing is that we don’t have to get to a particular point of goodness before God works in our lives. Like the woman of Samaria, our point of growth is from where we are.

Perhaps then we could make a twofold reason of why we come to church – amongst all the other reasons like habit and custom. We come to church to grow in our awareness of God, God who is to be worshipped in spirit and in truth; and we come that we may continue to grow as individuals, to grow in goodness, and all those associated qualities (2 Peter 1:5-7) that make us better people.