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Why Church?
What do we gain from coming to church that we couldn't get just as easily from our other social activities and private spiritual exploration?
Can't we get everything we're looking for via our own individual spiritual quest?
Rev. Ricky Hoyt points out six benefits that only a congregation offers:
• Nurturing Community• Broad Diversity
• Regular Contact with the Transcendant
• Supportive Tradition
• Challenge to Continued Spiritual Growth
• A Reason for "Doing Good" in the World
In a congregation you get exposed to people who ... aren't you. You get presented with ideas you might not think up on your own, that probably wouldn't appear in the books you would choose for yourself at the bookstore. You get to mingle with people who aren't your age, or sex, or race, or family situation. You are provide with a reason to more fully develop your personal beliefs. You get a congregation with a history and a tradition older than you that both grounds you as well as gives you the advantage of building on the best ideas and insights of previous generations. You find comrades outside yourself sharing your commitment to the social justice causes that inspire you.
In a congregation, you have a sacred space where people who aren't you will listen with sympathetic ears to your stories of success and failure, joys and sorrows, your unseemly pride, and your embarrassing disappointments. You have in the congregation, through the very act of covenant and membership, a reason outside yourself to keep going in your spiritual life, to show up again week after week, to not lose yourself in mild complacency, or in the arrogance of thinking you've got it all figured out. This congregation because it isn't just you, keeps you honest, keeps you focused, keeps you working, keeps you challenged and comforted; it questions our private revelations, and it shares it's revelations with us when our own spirit becomes uninspired.
