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A message from Pastor Marty

Why Church?

By Pastor Peter Marty

Pick your word for the latest news release on religious life in America: Distressing. Sad. Unsurprising. Worrisome. The new American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) released this week reveals some startling trends in religious practice. The faithful are scattering. Many people are abandoning church. Plenty are rejecting faith altogether. In the stretch of only 18 years, the span of a single generation, Americans claiming no religion at all jumped from 8% to 15% of the population. This occurred in a time when our nation grew through birth and immigration by 50 million adults.

If these numbers have you doing a double take, imagine the sociologists reviewing the same data. They’re looking at trend lines never seen before in American religious history. The statistics are sobering. So many survey respondents answered the basic question, “What is your religious identity?” with the word “None,” that a new category has emerged, larger than every denomination in the country except Catholics and Baptists. In Vermont, 34% of the people are labeled “Nones.”

You can read the ARIS survey details yourself when you get a moment. The most striking comment in the report may be that of survey co-author Barry Kosmin: “More than ever before, people are just making up their own stories of who they are. They say, ‘I’m everything. I’m nothing. I believe in myself.’” Who knows what feeds this instinct for people to “just make up their own stories of who they are.” Is it fantasy, arrogance, or just plain lostness? I’ll be the first to confess, I don’t know.

I’m trying to picture what it must be like to live in such an ad-hoc fashion, essentially making up one’s every day. Who cares if you love poetry or delight in nature? To live in this make-up-you-own-spirituality way basically means you have to jettison any tradition that might be older or wiser than you are. You must ignore any larger narrative that might help you figure out your place in the world. You certainly have no room for associating with churchgoers.

So, why church? Why do we attach ourselves to this body that is half mystery and half mess? What would possess us to participate in this strange menagerie of people who declare good news when things seem so bad, and who listen to truths from a God whom we cannot see? It is peculiar behavior, to be sure. Plenty of people take one look and opt immediately for believing in themselves, certain that their own way and their own story must be more reliable.

“A Christian congregation,” says Eugene Peterson, “is the least specialized gathering of human beings on the planet. Where else can you find yourself bracketed by nursing infants on one side, nodding octogenarians on the other, and rubbing shoulders with so many people whom you acknowledge, however grudgingly, as brothers and sisters, and with whom you have nothing in common except your common humanity — and God.”

The power and risk of this togetherness is too much for some. Yet for those of us who bend our lives around God’s decision to be the head of this odd-shaped body, such community delivers incredible joy and meaning.

In a congregation, we discover through the flaws, foibles, and faith of one another that we become better people than if we were left merely to ourselves. Healthy cells in a body function with their own unique purpose, but always in interdependent fashion. The only cells which insist on being independent and autonomous are cancer cells.

Why church? It’s that place of grace that prizes interdependence. It’s that community of people who believe the answer to their deepest need comes from outside themselves. It is that awesome body of faithful souls who caused an unbelieving woman to say to me not long ago, as she sat beside her dying husband: “Pastor, the people of your church are beyond words. I will never be able to tell you what their cards, food, and love have meant to me. You have no idea.”

Actually, I have some idea. It’s the love that happens when people believe more in God and each other than in themselves.

Pastor Peter Marty,

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