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WHY GO TO CHURCH ?
Or
What is the Role of the Church in Today’s World

Professor Lloyd Geering - Sunday August 14th

That’s a question we evidently ought to be asking. A hundred years ago about half of the population were at church on any one Sunday. Today it’s down to about 8%. An increasing number of people see no good reason why they should go to church any more.
In the days when nearly everybody in the Western world went to church, the weekly practice used to be referred to as public worship. It was the people’s worship of God.
In today’s very diverse global village the term ‘public worship’ no longer suits, partly because it is no longer all the people who are doing it and partly because people no longer share the same understanding of God. Today there is considerable diversity in the way people conceive God. The reason for this is simple. The word God is not the proper name of a spiritual being, whose existence is open to public investigation and proof. The word God is a symbolic term which has had a long cultural history. It is the term by which people of various traditions have referred to values that are of vital importance to them - values which they find to lay some moral and spiritual claim upon them.
Before we ask what does it mean to worship God today, let us ask how church going started in the first place. Of course the practice has not always been popularly known as “church-going”. That is a comparatively modern term. What is more, the practice we call ‘church-going’ started before there were any churches to go to.

You may be surprised to learn that it started in the land we now call Iraq, some time between 550 and 350 BC. But it had such a very insignificant start, that the historical details have long been lost. It started among the Jews when they were taken into exile by the Babylonians. The start is reflected in an ancient psalm. ‘By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion’. In this practice of gathering together to weep and remember, there came to birth a new type of religious institution. It is unlike any to be found hitherto. From this simple gathering together there eventually evolved the synagogue, which simply means ‘gathering together’. And from the synagogue came the church and the mosque. This new religious
institution was not given any of these names until later. Even the Jewish term synagogue is not Hebrew but Greek and comes from about 250 BC when the Jews were scattered round the Greek world and were speaking Greek.
Since the Jews in Babylon had no temple in which to offer sacrifices, they met together every seventh day, simply recalling the story of their past. That is how they retained their identity. They compiled their traditions and sagas into one continuous story. It consists of the first five books of the Bible and became the definitive written version of who they were. They called it the Torah and read a portion every Sabbath, completing it each year. And the Jews still do.
The Torah began with a new story of creation, to supersede the older, more primitive, story, which now follows it in Genesis. They reshaped the old story to make it show how the Sabbath began. The climax of the new story tells how God himself was the very first ever to rest on the seventh day. It was a time when he reflected on who he was and what he had done.
Thus began the practice by which the Jews came together on the Sabbath to remember who they were. As the Jew reads the Torah every Saturday in the Synagogue, so the Christian reads the Bible every Sunday in Church and the Muslim reads the Qur’an every Friday at the Mosque.
This new kind of religious institution was not led by priests but by teachers and scholars. The synagogue was not a temple; it has been called a “layperson’s institute”. To this day, in the Jewish synagogue, the rabbi is a scholar, not a priest. The chief officer of a mosque, the imam, is a teacher, not a priest. Also in the Christian churches at first, the chief officers in were not called priests but overseers, elders and servers. The Greek for ‘overseer’ is episcopos, giving us Episcopal. The Greek for
elder is presbuteros, giving us presbyter. The Greek for server is diaconos, giving us deacon.
The first Christian churches were really Christian synagogues, doing much the same thing as the Jews when they gathered together. They shared a common meal of bread and wine; they read and studied the same Scriptures, for it was another 300 years before the New Testament became part of the Bible. Today, of course, synagogue, church and mosque look very
different from each other. But underneath the later developments we find the original components intact. In each there is a coming together of people to celebrate what they have in common, to be reminded of who they are and to nurture their personal fulfilment. For this purpose they read their communal story and they socialise. The Christians who have
preserved these essentials in all their simplicity are the Quakers. They speak of church-going as the ‘meeting’ and of their buildings as ‘meeting houses’. Another example would be the Unitarians.

It in the light of this brief sketch that we now turn to the questions. What is the point of our meeting today? What dos it mean to worship God? What are the values which we regard as of ultimate importance? The chief value affirmed by Christians has always been love; that is why the Bible says ‘God is love’. Out of love flow the values of fair-play, justice, compassion, and, more recently, tolerance, freedom - freedom to think for oneself, freedom to speak one’s mind and freedom to be one’s
own unique self. These latter values came to the fore as the modern secular world began to emerge out of Christendom, about the 18th century onwards. These values came out of the Christian tradition, with its basic value of love, and they soon gave rise to a whole series of emancipations– the democratic emancipation from absolute monarchy, the emancipation of the slaves, the emancipation of women from male domination, the emancipation of the humankind from racist prejudice and, currently, the
emancipation of homosexuals from homophobia. But sadly, the majority in the main-line churches were initially opposed to every one of these emancipations.
If they were no longer affirming the values of love, justice, freedom, and tolerance of diversity, they were no longer worshipping
God but were idolizing outworn dogmas of the past. This is why the churches have become increasingly marginalized from society.
Commitment to today’s supreme values – that is what public worship means. Today, alas, it is often to be found more outside of the churches than within them. The churches must stop treating the secular world as an enemy to be fought and welcome it as the new form of the Christian tradition out of which it has come. As Anglican theologian J. R. Illingworth said in 1891:
‘Secular civilization has co-operated with Christianity to produce the modern world. It is nothing less than the providential correlative and counterpart of the incarnation’. The failure of the churches to recognise that the secular world has
evolved out of their own central doctrine – the incarnation of the divine within the human world - has meant that those outside of the churches – now more than three-quarters of New Zealanders - are often failing to realise how much they owe to the Christian past. The churches must now bear some of the blame that such people are cutting themselves off from their cultural and spiritual roots.
The church is failing because it has strayed from the path of true worship and has forgotten its own distant roots. Over many centuries it developed into an institution that wielded great power. It came to believe it possessed the ultimate truth about everything of importance. Over the last five hundred years that church, like Humpty Dumpty, has been suffering a great fall. Nothing can restore to it the power and authority it used to wield. To find its true role the church must reform itself. Just as
the Protestant Reformers set out to take the church back to the first century, so now we must go back even further, to the beginning of the synagogue in ancient Babylon.
To illustrate how this can be done, let me tell you about a Jewish rabbi I met in America, called Richard Rubenstein. He wrote a book called After Auschwitz. In it he says it is impossible to go on believing in the traditional God of Judaism after the Nazi holocaust. The God who supposedly saved their ancestors on the shores of the Red Sea certainly failed to do so in the death camps of Auschwitz and Belsen. Rubenstein said to his fellow Jews, ‘Our problem is how to be religious in the time of the death of God. How can people best share the decisive crises of life, given the cold, unfeeling, indifferent cosmos that surrounds us.’ The reason why he still goes to the synagogue, he said, is this. ‘Judaism is the way we Jews share our lives in an unfeeling and silent cosmos. It is the flickering candle we have lighted in the dark to enlighten and to warm us”. That is just why the synagogue began in ancient Babylon! This offers a clue to us Christians in today’s rapidly changing, which has lost the certainties of the past. Robert Bellah, a Christian sociologist, said: ‘We must increasingly accept the notion that all people must work out their own ultimate solutions to the meaning of life. What the institutional church can do is to provide the most favourable environment for doing so, without imposing on them a prefabricated set of answers.’
That is the role of the church in today’s secular and post-Christian world. The church is not a ghetto for the elect, the saved, the selfrighteous, the people who think they have all the answers to life. It is not a place where we are told the authoritative answers to the meaning of life. The church is a coming together of people who are looking for answers and are ready to help one another to find their own answers. So the church is a gathering of all people, of any belief, nationality, class, colour, age, gender or sexual orientation. What we people in church have in common is simply our humanity and our readiness to assist one another
in finding meaning and fulfilment in our lives. But meaning is not created out of nothing but out of the whole cultural and religious tradition that has made us. That is why we continue to study and ponder our past. The tradition does not provide us with
ready-made answers; it gives us some of the raw material out of which we may create our own answers.
The role of the church, like the synagogue out of which it came, is to help each of us live life to the full.