I willingly have to

Every Sunday morning a stream of people make a stupendous countercultural declaration. They decide to gather as the church.

Although some youths might disagree, there are very few people who are dragged against their will to gather with Christians for corporate worship, where they experience life beneath God’s Word, Christian conversation, mutual encouragement and pre-Swiss Chalet coffee.

Long gone are the days when stores were closed, playground swings chained and the western world screeched to a Sunday halt out of respect for the gathering of the faithful. These days we shop, golf, play hockey, read the paper or go to work without anyone so much as blinking an eye. Every day is mostly like every other.

This is the day of the truly voluntary, willing church. It should be wonderfully encouraging that anyone gathers at all, given the myriad of options and distractions, work schedules and family realities. For possibly the first time in Canadian history, the church gathered is a willing countercultural statement, and most Christians don’t realize how rebellious they really are. If only they would!

We come together not because we are forced to, but because we have to. Perhaps that sounds contradictory, but there is an enormous chasm between “force” and “have” in this case. No one in our culture is remotely forced to gather with other believers. There is no overt state pressure to be together. There is nothing in the wider culture that encourages or supports the corporate gathering of the church on Sundays, or any other day for that matter. Christians gather—whenever they gather—because of Jesus, because the Spirit draws, and because we have to.

So, we’re not forced, but how is it that we “have” to gather? We have to because we who have determined to follow Jesus with shouldered cross need to be “unperverted.” While it’s true that the whole of life is given to God, that my whole life from breakfast to coffee-break to midnight snack is worship, I live in a world in which I am ever swimming upstream against a raging torrent of consumerism, idolatry, selfishness and indifference. Given that the following of Jesus is increasingly a lonely journey on the street corners, in the factories and in the schools of our nation, it is increasingly necessary for Christians to gather. If we don’t, we inevitably catch the common “cold” of our world, lose the fire of our first love, miss how beautiful Jesus is in the face of our neighbour, and begin to wither.

We simply have to be together as more than two or three—not simply so that hymnals get used, pastors have something to do, or offerings get collected—but because every day we are hammered by the perversion and ungodliness of our culture and we need the time together to “unpervert” ourselves, to remember who we really are, to support one another, love one another and hear the Word again, all in order that we may be re-commissioned to love the world as Jesus does.

We are a peculiar people. We’re really quite strange. Every time Christians gather we are making a shocking declaration that there is another way and only one Lord. We gather because we willingly have to. So, “let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching” (Hebrews 10:25).