An axiom to help Christians think about how to meet together – Meeting together, Part 1

As we learned in the preview post, the last 25-35 years, 40 million adult Americans in all religious traditions, left their houses of worship.[1]

This does not include people who attend church infrequently.  If they attend on Christmas and Easter, they are not counted in these numbers.  40 million totally gone.  Of the 40 million, 15 million are evangelicals. The numbers are staggering.  Lots of people, have given up on church.

Why are people changing their practice of meeting together?

In our contemporary society, participation in a church has some serious competition.  I have a feeling you can guess the church’s four main competitors, which all start with the letter S: sleeping, streaming, scrolling, and sports.

And that leads us to a conclusion.  The majority of people are not leaving the church because of a fifth S: scandals.   There are absolutely church scandals that have caused people to leave the church, far too many scandals.   

But the report says that “30 million of the 40 million people who have left the church in America have left casually.”  Casually?  What does that mean?  It means that they have “no pain point, animus or even high degree of intentionality for leaving.”  So why did they leave?  The top three reasons are: 1. They moved.  2. Attendance was inconvenient.  3. They had a family change, like a divorce.  They stopped going, and they haven’t returned. 

So what?  What does it matter? Do Christians really need to meet together?

Last week I started a blog series on relationships in the church, starting with how we are to encourage one another.  This week we’re talking about meeting together. That brings me to my high school soccer coach.  He loved axioms.  An axiom is a pithy statement meant to explain an obvious, but important truth.  For example, you cannot win a soccer game unless you score a goal.  Or the axiom that is logically next: You cannot score a goal unless you get the ball into your opponent’s net. 

Those are so obvious. You want to roll your eyes and say, “Of course.  Tell me something I don’t know.”  But the power of the axiom is that it states the obvious to help us get to the root of a problem.  For my high school soccer team, at halftime when we hadn’t yet scored any goals, my coach’s axiom was meant to shake us into the reality, the down-to-earth truth, of what it will take to turn the game around and score some goals.

Likewise, in the church, if we are having a sermon about relationships, we need a really down-to-earth axiom.  Here’s an axiom for meeting together:

You won’t have relationships in the church if you don’t have any relationships in the church.

I was tempted to write the axiom like this: you can’t have any relationship in the church if you aren’t meeting together.  That would be good.  That would work.  But I like the first one better: You won’t have relationships in the church if you don’t have any relationships in the church.  I like that better because it forces us to ask, “Do I have relationships in the church?”

“Yes, of course we do,” we say to ourselves.  But I encourage you to evaluate your relationships more deeply. The axiom has opened a door to help us evaluate our relationships in the church.  What is the quality of those relationships? 

“Do I have good relationships, deep relationships, meaningful relationships, in the church family?  Or am I just in proximity to people, maybe saying a few words about the weather, sports, or the news?” 

Good, deep, meaningful relationships require us to meet together, but meeting together is so much more than just being in the same room. This week we’ll talk about what the Bible has to say about how Christians are to meet together.

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Photo by Small Group Network on Unsplash

[1] From the Good Faith Podcast, October 14, 2023, “The Great Dechurching”.