There is a quote that I see from time to time on my Facebook news feed that when I see people “liking” causes me to wonder. As best I can find, the quote comes from Billy Sunday in his book Billy Sunday: The Man and His Message.

“Going to church doesn’t make you a Christian anymore than going to a garage makes you an automobile.”

I am assuming that what Billy Sunday — an Evangelist — meant by this quote was that mere rote church attendance without commitment, discipline, feeling, service, etc. is not what makes one Christian. But I sometimes think that this quote is being used in some ways as an anti-church kind of statement:  I can be a Christian without the church.

And that’s what gets the wheels in my mind turning.

Can I have Jesus without the church? Certainly our God, and God as we know God in Christ, is bigger than any person or institution and is known in people’s personal lives outside of church. So in one sense the answer is yes.

And before I go further, I have to confess that I am employed by the church. My livelihood comes from it, and so any argument in its favor might seem like an attempt to protect my paycheck. But here’s the thing, my feelings about and commitment to church go way beyond a paycheck, a job, a title.

My Story

Can I have Jesus without the church? In my life I’m not sure that would have happened. The earliest part of my life involved attending church maybe once or twice a year at Christmas or Easter and not really understanding why we went at those times. As an adolescent I was brought to the church by my grandmother, who was dying from cancer and seeking the solace of a spiritual community.

I was baptized in that church, and when my grandmother died that church embraced me. Friends who went to school with me and also attended that church encouraged me to come to Sunday School and youth group and camp. People I didn’t know paid my way to go to church camp every summer. People of the church provided some scholarship money for me to travel to New York and Washington D.C. on a trip called International Affairs Seminary, where my worldview and faith view were expanded in ways I never imagined possible.  I was introduced to one of my church’s higher institutes of learning, TCU, and eventually attended, receiving scholarships and graduating with a BA and later an M.Div.

A Community of Faith

In the years of my life that were chaotic when I faced a very real chance of becoming lost, the church saved me — not just in a spiritual, afterlife kind of sense, but in an everyday real world kind of a way. This was all because of church. But even more than that, as I spend more time leading and living in church, I realize how indispensable it is.

And I want you to hear me. I am not saying that church is perfect. Certainly church has brought about about a lot of ill in the world. But here’s the thing about church, it is not a place of perfection. The church should not be viewed so much as a Sanctuary for Saints but as a hospital for sinners.

And what the church does at its best is provide a community where we all come — happy and sad, healed and broken, straight-laced and flawed, young and old — and hear the Good News that God loves even us and that together, with God’s Spirit in our hearts, we can love each other even when it’s hard. The faith of church calls us to reconcile with each other, to do better and to be better, to think outside of our own self-interests and serve others. And that is something that cannot be done in isolation, alone.

Left out in the Rain

The season of Advent (that the church observes in the weeks leading to Christmas)  is about waiting, yearning for God to be with us. This song (The Yearning) captures that sentiment; and while we know that Jesus certainly works in people’s individual lives outside of the church, we know that our yearning for his presence is made real in church and the active life of faith we learn to live out there in community with others. So don’t give up on church. Give it try and understand that it may take more than one time or a visit to any one particular church.

A car is not by definition a car simply because it is parked in a garage; however, a car parked in the sanctuary of a garage is less likely to succumb to the elements, decay, break-ins and scratches and dings than is a car parked out in the rain.  So dear Christ follower (or Christ seeker, or one curious about Christ), get thee to the Sanctuary of a church and you may just find that your faith is strengthened in ways you could not have imagined. This is my prayer for you.