God Is Not Limited To A Building

 "God isn't limited to a church building" is, nine times out of ten, not the language of faith speaking. It's crucial that believers understand this. Yes, sometimes we can't gather. But the church is the ecclesia, the "gathering." The fact that God is everywhere does not mean that He is everywhere "for you" with His saving gifts. You need His Word, including preaching and the communion of saints.

Being dismissive of the gathering of believers (rather than mourning its loss, in the rare event that it is lost) is the first step down the road to a wholesale rejection of faith. Lone-ranger Christianity begins with the believer confidently asserting that they can read the Word themselves perfectly fine at home and scoffing at those who "need a building." But this is rarely kept up for long. Once out of the habit of gathering, it becomes easier and more convenient to stay away. Believe me when I tell you that even in the realm of online services, viewership has gone way down in the past year or so. It is known that those exclusively "worshiping at home" eventually, in the long term, don't worship at home. Disconnected from the body of Christ, the individual Christian dies.

Pop-American Christianity has laid the groundwork for this destructive form of individualism for several decades, and the fruit it's bearing is terrible. Forms' of the church that strongly minimize the importance of the things that are incarnational and tangible-- like the sacraments and the absolution-- are more naturally prone to the temptation of a "Christianity" that becomes increasingly disembodied, undefined, private, and centered on the merely cerebral or emotional. But there are zero excuses for Lutherans to be taken in by this.

If you can't gather with the believers for some reason, mourn the loss-- don't shrug and say, "God is everywhere." If you are intentionally avoiding the gathering of believers and the preaching of the Word in any form you are able to hear it, you're breaking the Third Commandment. And if you're flaunting this commandment with an unrepentant heart, your very faith is hanging in the balance. That is something that needs to be taken very seriously.

-Kelly Klages