A Going Problem

“Go to church, go to church, all the time, all the time, go to church.” This was my little brother’s observation as a preschooler when he was told, get in the car, we are going to church.

I was raised in a church going family. I raised a church going family. My brother, the same one as above, raised a church going family. Sometimes it seemed that, yes, we were always going to church.

Some people think that going to church is a problem. The church expects way too much of them to be going all the time. Our current culture has pretty much limited church going to a once a week journey, usually on Sunday morning. The number of attendees at mid week services or even Sunday evening services has plummeted.

Ask people to make another journey to the church building for worship, prayer, study, service, or any other reason and we are accused in a busy culture of creating a going problem. If you have the additional audacity to suggest that people “go on mission,” you really create a going problem.

With apologies to Avodart, whose commercials you see regularly these days, perhaps we don’t have a going problem, but a growing problem. I may be that our unwillingness to invest time, energy, and resources to the things of the Lord doesn’t reflect so much our unwillingness to go, as our unwillingness to grow.