Why We Still Gather
On the stubborn, embodied, irreplaceable practice of meeting together.
It would be easier, in some ways, to stop. The livestream is convenient. The podcast is portable. The sermon can be paused and resumed at will, the worship curated to taste. A faith you can attend in your pajamas asks very little of you, and that is precisely the problem. The early Christians risked their lives to assemble. We can scarcely be bothered to leave the house. Something has shifted, and it is worth asking what.
The church is not first an idea or a feed. It is a body, and bodies have parts that must be in the same place to function. You cannot be a hand over the internet. The laying on of hands, the breaking of bread, the holy kiss, the bearing of one another’s burdens — these are not metaphors that translate cleanly into pixels. They require presence. They require the friction of other people, the inconvenience of their needs, the gift of their faces.
We gather because formation happens in proximity. You are shaped by the people you stand beside in song, kneel beside in prayer, sit beside in silence. You learn patience from the long-winded and humility from the difficult and hope from the dying saint two pews over who is somehow still singing. None of this is downloadable. It is caught, not taught, and it is caught in the room.
We gather because the table is not a symbol we observe but a meal we share. Communion alone is a contradiction. The bread is broken to be passed. The cup is poured to be handed across. To eat together is to confess that we belong to one another and not only to God in private.
And we gather because the world is watching for a people who are actually a people. Our individualism is not neutral; it is the air we breathe and it is slowly suffocating us. The gathered church is a counter-sign — evidence that there is another way to be human, one that does not begin and end with the self and its preferences.
So come back, if you have drifted. Not because the music is good or the preaching is brilliant, though it may be. Come because you are a member, and the body is incomplete without you, and there is a place beside someone that only you can fill. We still gather because we were never meant to do this alone.
— Sunny