With America losing its name as a "Christian nation," blogger Matt Walsh is not surprised that the number of churchgoers continues to go down.
"Yet not everyone sees dwindling church attendance as a problem. Not even every church leader agrees," he writes in an article for The Blaze. Walsh was already alarmed over this sad fact, but his alarm bells rang off some more after a so-called pastor from North Carolina named John Pavlovitz wrote an article entitled, "Relax Christians, You Don't Have To Go to Church."
"Of course, a pastor telling Christians not to go to church is like a dentist warning his patients not to brush their teeth. It's absurd and self-defeating, to put it mildly," Walsh says. "What I'd like to do is use him as a jumping off point to tackle the common anti-church talking points you always hear from the unchurched crowd."
It's true that the Bible never specifically requires people to say grace before each meal or pray with children before going to bed, but Walsh argues: "Why wouldn't you do it anyway?" Besides, Walsh says abandoning the church never seems like the right approach.
At the same time, Walsh says the reasons Christians give out for not attending church are nothing short of "lame." He's actually heard them all before: People are tired, it's a hassle to go to church, the service is boring, the seats are uncomfortable, and Facebook seems more interesting.
"Aside from the people who are physically unable to attend because of infirmity or some other extreme circumstance, the primary excuses for skipping sound pretty lame when you say them out loud," says Walsh. "Granted, sometimes we have justifications that feel more righteous. Maybe we went to church a while ago and something happened there that offended us. Maybe we've tried out the churches close by and found something distasteful about all of them."
But whatever the reason, Walsh stresses that church isn't just a fun thing people do when it strikes their fancy. It's not a recreational activity, but an adoration activity for God. "It is, as much as we like to pretend otherwise, an actual necessity and obligation of Christian life," he says.
