Why Should Protestants go to Church?                  10/10/48

 

Scripture:  Psalm 122

 

Text:  Psalm 122: 1;  “I was glad when they said unto me, let us go into the house of the Lord.”

 

Generations of Christian people have learned the ten commandments in Sunday School, at home, or in special classes.  The fourth commandment is a long one, elaborated with an impressive number of “thou shalt nots.”  But it is initially expressed in a single positive statement:  “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.”

 

Childhood recollections will give many of us a mental picture of the origin of the Ten Commandments.  We remember the literal reading of the Exodus story which describes the giving of these centrally important precepts to Moses while he waited on the mountain in the presence of Almighty God.  Perhaps they were crystallized in the mind of Moses in an hour of exalted inspiration and graven then and there on tablets of stone.  But God had been giving the commandments for a long time.  Sensitive men had been learning their validity by long, slow experience.  And the same precepts have been tested in the mills of human experience through the centuries and millenniums since Moses.

 

Man needs rest from hard labor, regularly.  More than that, he needs re-creation and spiritual elevation.  And his best re-building of self is found in the worship of Almighty God.  For we are not the creatures of our own whims, but we are the creation of the Eternal in whom we live and have our true being.

 

And so the day of rest has been, among true Hebrews and Christians, a day of worship and a day of study and discussion of religious precepts.

 

To those for whom it is easier and more palatable to have a classified list of virtues and sins than to rely chiefly on the attitude of virtue, church attendance is a virtue, and neglect of church attendance is a sin.

 

I am concerned in this discussion with the Protestant point of view which emphasizes the attitude rather than the particular, though a worthy attitude does issue in particulars.  It is evident that there is an enormous indifference among Protestant people to the claims of the Sabbath on their lives.  For our welfare, we had better recognize it and do what needs to be done about it.

 

The Protestant church that has one third of its members at a church service, morning or evening, on the Christian Sabbath, Sunday, is doing at least as well as the average over the nation.  Where are the other two thirds on a given Sunday?  Relaxing at home, off for a trip, busy with games or guests, busy at church time with Sunday labor, ill or indisposed, perhaps absent from town --- the answers can be strung out into quite a list --- most of which are customary excuses.

 

Basically the Protestants who do not get to church just don’t think it is important enough to do so!  They have not been trained to believe that it is sinful to stay away from worship.  They are not impressed with its superior virtue.  They just do not want to go!  I was impressed with the honesty, and I think accuracy, of one of the members of our own church who said several years ago, “If we really want to get to church, we’ll be there.  We do the other things we think are important and really want to do.  We can get to church if we want to.  Most of the reasons we advance for our absences are just plausible excuses.”

 

Those of us who believe with all our lives in the public worship of God in church must know whereof we believe and become missionaries of that faith to those who know it not.  For we live in a world as dangerously full of evil as ever, as urgently needy for positive, aggressive righteousness as any age of history, as filled with hatreds, suspicions and narrow ambitions as can be, short of violent social explosion.

 

Particularly here in the United States and Canada is it necessary that we of the Protestant faith know how to be good Protestants and be willing to work at it.  We too easily forget that the civil freedom for which all the rest of the earth envies us is rooted in the free church notion of liberty.  The overwhelming majority of colonial leaders who came to these shores and stayed, were folk who wanted liberty from unbearable dominance by both church and state in Europe, and who wanted freedom to worship as they wished and freedom to govern themselves.

 

Now we need a vigorous restoration of the duty of positive self-government by voting and taking active interest in our governments.  And the spiritual basis of being a free citizen is in the exercise of free worship.  We American people must constantly, faithfully remind ourselves that liberty is not just absence of constraint, but is the exercise of the orderly processes of freedom.

 

The frontier communities found out quickly that there was far less liberty in slugging and shooting it out with the predatory elements than in the energetic creation of orderly, lawful channels of living maintained by the citizenry.

 

But within the framework of law and order, there must be righteousness.  There are good laws, and there may be bad laws passed and enforced.  We cannot escape the need of goodness in civic living.  And so we need a standard of righteousness.  That standard, for a free people, is the living, vital consciousness of the will, the way, of the good God for all people.  This means the continuous regeneration of people in the conscious desire to be, and to do, right.

 

There is only one basic source of this spiritual vitality.  It is in the God who is infinitely better, greater, holier than men and women.  It is a primary necessity that people worship God, seek his way, experience his forgiveness and salvation, talk with him in prayer, become confident of his guidance.  When the strength of godly righteousness is sapped away, the predatory evil in ambitious men takes control and evil is visited upon mankind.

 

It is high time that we Protestants generally recognize the importance of going to church regularly.  Church attendance is not optional in the Christian life.  We are reaping the harvest of decades of easy-going indifference about church attendance.  And our lack of sufficient spiritual strength to guide and mold our national life is glaring testimony to the folly of our ways.

 

We are informed that church attendance is important to a Roman Catholic.   That is evidenced by the numbers of people who enter Catholic church doors at the times of regular Sunday mass.  It is heightened by special occasions like the red-coated pack of Catholic hunters kneeling at the special pre-dawn hunters’ mass in deer season.  It is emphasized at our Boy Scout camp where the Catholic Scouts must have ways and means to get to the catholic church on Sunday, while the Protestant and Jewish boys have a little character talk of sorts at the camp.  Why is it not just as urgent that Scout camp programs be set up to include provision for definite attendance at genuine worship?  Because we are not convinced enough of its importance to see to it that it is done.

 

We needn’t hide behind the belief that our neighbors go to church because they “have to,” or because they “fear not to,” or because they dislike the assigned penance for the sin of absence so much that they would rather attend and get it over with.  It just might be that they have learned to like to go to their church and consider it personally important to do so!

 

It is no less important for a Protestant to go to his church.  We ought to be on the constant habitual search for the presence and the guidance of God.  Suppose it is true in our experience that we sometimes don’t get a particular thrill or an unusual lift at morning services.  If we got a genuine experience of God’s guidance in the house of God twice a year, it would be well worth the effort to be there every week.  And some deep and soul-satisfying, renewing, spiritual experience comes far oftener than that to the one who attends worshipfully and regularly and habitually.

 

Are we content to drift along until some authoritarian control regiments us into an ecclesiastical and governmental pattern?  Or do we purpose to attend public worship and keep our churches strong on a voluntary basis?

 

Let us not just resolve to attend worship as a duty alone, but let us look for beauty, dignity, inspiration in our worship, so vital that people will not want to stay away.  Here the members of the choir make a definite contribution in their faithful attendance at rehearsals in order to produce church music with artistry and reverence.  Here the minister performs a basic function as he labors, in mental concentration and spiritual attention, on the message to be brought to worshippers in the sermon, and as he tries to guide their attention in the order of Sunday morning worship.  Here the congregation serves God in keeping the sanctuary clean, repaired, beautiful --- and the house of God ought to be so --- even better than our homes!  Our parish activities ought to be so alive that people will want to come and join in them.

 

We Protestant Christians must see that this is an earnest, a mighty serious, matter.  We can not afford the risks to personality and to civilized society in neglecting to train ourselves and our children in the facts and traditions of our faith.  We need to know it and to be proud of it and to improve it in ourselves.

 

At the Wisconsin Congregational conference in Eau Claire last week there was a vivid bit of drama presented, in which a mother, deeply disturbed about her 14-year old boy, interviewed a neighboring minister with the request that he “get the boy to come to Sunday School.”  (That is too big an order, an unfair demand.)  She was advised to bring the boy (as she should have done for years before.)  She and her husband could, and should, take their active part in the church.  In surprise, she replied that it was the boy she was concerned about, not herself or her husband.  As a matter of truth, they had only Sunday morning to be together, because the husband was away at his work most of the week and they couldn’t very well give up this one morning of the week!  And so the little drama ended in tragedy!

 

It is terribly important that the whole family be in the church.  The best way to assure that our youth will be there is to be there ourselves!  That method of persuasion is not fool-proof, because the ways of the world sometimes prove treacherous to our hopes; but a demonstration that we believe in the importance of the church is far and away the best method of persuading our children of the value of church attendance.

 

At Eau Claire, Superintendent Jess Norenberg commented that a certain community had a 4th-of-July committee which scheduled a parade for 10:00 A.M. last Independence Day.  Children were to have a prominent part in the parade.  Sponsoring businessmen were rightly embarrassed when it was pointed out to them that the 4th was on Sunday this year and that the place for the children at that hour of the day and week was at their churches, learning their moral ABCs.  “We need to tackle programs more ambitious than balancing budgets alone, said Supt. Norenberg.  “We must raise our sights above petty interests and seek to bring the invisible out of heaven and to make it as visible as walking people.”

 

There is nothing more important!

 

The Stewardship Committee of the Department of Evangelism in the Federal Council of Churches has listed these ten reasons for systematic church attendance.  I commend them to you as a positive approach to our need.

 

Ten Reasons for Systematic Church Attendance.

 

1)  Because of the example of our Lord.  “He went as was His custom....”  [Luke 4: 16[.

2)  Because of the Scriptural exhortation that echoes across the centuries, “Not forsaking our own assembling together as the custom of some is.”  [Hebrews 10: 25].

3)  Because of the uplift which comes through worship.  Who is not conscious that his greatest need in these days is “A Presence which disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts?”

4)  Because of the harmonizing of the soul with the music of the spheres.  Our age cries out for those who are “In the spirit of the Lord’s Day.”

5)  Because of the joys of Christian fellowship.  “Behold, how pleasant and how good that we, one Lord confessing, together dwell in brotherhood, our unity expressing.”

6)  Because of the courage and Christian optimism received.  “I had fainted unless I had believed to see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.”  [Psalm 27: 13]. 

7)  Because of the contribution that worship makes to the building of a peaceful world.  “The rich and the poor meet together.  The Lord is the maker of them all.”  [Proverbs 22: 2].  World brotherhood can be realized only as it finds its source in our hearts, our homes, our communities, our nation.

8)  Because of the development of a sensitive conscience.  It is when we see “the Lord high and lifted up” that we cry, “Woe is me for I am undone, for I am a man of unclean lips and I dwell in the midst of  a people of unclean lips.”  [Isaiah 6: 5].

9)  Because of the acquiring of a passion to serve.  It is the love of God, nourished in the sanctuary, which leads us to “love our neighbor as ourselves” and to serve in the spirit of Him “who came not to be ministered unto but to minister.”

10)  Because of the glory worship ascribes to God.  Our age needs to recover its lost appreciation of the glory and majesty of God.

            [Stewardship Committee--Department of Evangelism,    Federal Council of Churches.]

 

We Protestants should all go to church regularly and faithfully, because our civilization, the way of life we like and think best for all people, is rooted spiritually in free worship and understanding of God’s principles, and can live only by the continuation of the spirit in which it originates.  We should attend church because we like to do so and believe in its spirit and service wholeheartedly.  We should attend church faithfully because worship ascribes to God the glory too often appropriated by men but belonging only to the Most High above all men.   “I was glad when they said unto me, Let us go into the house of the Lord.”  [Psalm 122: 1].

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Delivered in Wisconsin Rapids, October 10, 1948.