In college, I did what many young adults do – I walked away from the church. 

Hear me out: I didn’t stop believing in God.  In fact, my faith in college was vibrant and growing.  I spent hours studying God’s word.  I enjoyed intimate times of worship full of God’s presence at home or driving around in my car.  I cultivated wonderful relationships with other believers who loved God and who like me were learning what it meant to follow Jesus (I’m still learning this today!). 

But if you went looking for me on Sunday mornings, I can assure you there was one place you would have been hard pressed to find me: in a church.  I didn’t give up on God and I didn’t walk away from Jesus, but there was a season where I was totally disinterested from church attendance.  Here’s how it happened: 

It started innocently enough, from a place of understandable curiosity.  I went to college in the same town I grew up in, so after high school, I was still attending the same church I’d been attending since 3^rd grade.  Honestly, I was bored.  We still sang the same songs we’d always sung.  The sermons all sounded the same.  We gathered in the exact same ways and did the exact same things we’d been doing for years.  I was bored out of my mind – not with God per se, but with my church.  I reasoned if I was bored with my church, a new church must be the logical solution.

For a few months, I bounced from church to church trying to find a new one.  Each church I attended was unique.  Some excelled at preaching, others had great music.  Some churches looked as though I’d just entered a coffee shop while others felt more like a rock concert complete with state-of-the-art lighting programs and celebrity pastors.  Each church was different and yet, for all their attempts at uniqueness, they felt eerily similar.  So, after about a year of bouncing from church to church, I just stopped going anywhere on Sunday mornings.  If each church was unique and yet basically the same thing, I concluded it was just time to find new ways to spend my Sunday mornings.

Remember, I wasn’t mad at the church – disillusioned yes, bored for sure, but angry not so much.  I didn’t doubt the existence of God.  I still loved Jesus.  I read my Bible, prayed, and worshiped.  I simply decided I didn’t really need what was happening on Sunday mornings between the hours of 8am and noon to faithfully follow Jesus.

It would be about a year before God changed my heart, but more on this in a moment.

In Acts 2, the Holy Spirit is poured out upon the people of Jesus (about 120 of them) and each of them is filled with God’s Spirit. 

The people Jesus has formed around Himself have now been filled with God’s spirit and are now the temple of God. The people who gathered in the space that God filled are now the temple (1 Corinthians 6:19) – not the space itself. 

You… Me… Us… We are the temples God desires to fill.  Buildings might be special places with unique significance to us, but it is the people, filled with God’s Spirit, who become God’s living, breathing temples released throughout God’s world to bless people through their witness of Jesus. 

People, not property, are the places God desires to inhabit.  When the Holy Spirit filled those first Christ followers, their message wasn’t, “Follow us back into this specific building, so you can experience God’s presence.”  Their message was, “What God has done for you in Christ is available right here, right now.”

It was the people, not the property, who were filled with God’s spirit.  It was bodies, not buildings, released as God’s witnesses.  Because of Pentecost, we don’t have to show up in a specific place at a specific time to encounter God’s presence.

But this almost always raises a question: If God’s desire is to fill me and if this really can happen anywhere, why do this whole church thing at all? If God desires to fill us and we therefore don’t need a special building to worship God, why do we still insist on the importance of gathering?  At the risk of oversimplifying, here’s why we continue to gather:

While we don’t need a place to meet with God, we still need places to meet with each other. 

God may not be bound by space or time or location, but we are. 

We need spaces to gather.  We need places to meet.  We need locations to come together in Jesus’ name. 

We don’t meet at specific times and locations because God is confined to those places – God is confined to nothing.  We meet at specific times and places because we are limited by these realities and yet God desires his people to gather together in his name. 

Places of worship aren’t special because that’s where God shows up – they’re special because that’s where we show up and learn to do life together in the way of Jesus.

Can we worship God on the beach?  Absolutely. 

Can we experience His presence in the mountains?  You bet.

Can a movie theater function as a cathedral of praise?  Of course, it can.

Can we connect with God online in our homes?  For sure.

Where we gather isn’t important – that we gather together is non-negotiable.  Hear how Hebrews 10 makes this abundantly clear:

"Therefore, brothers and sisters, since we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way opened for us through the curtain, that is, his body, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near to God with a sincere heart and with the full assurance that faith brings, having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience and having our bodies washed with pure water.  Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful.  And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching."  ~ Hebrews 10:19-25 (NIV)

First, take note of the communal language.  This isn’t about you and Jesus doing your thing apart from everyone and everything else.  Having personal time alone with Jesus is important, but don't miss that Jesus expects us to do things with His family as well.  Imagine marrying someone and then saying, “I love you, but I want nothing to do with the people you love.  I love you, but I don't want to spend any time with them.”  While that may be true for some marriages, that’s sure to make a marriage challenging, complicated, and full of conflict.  While churches are indeed messy places and often filled with hypocrisy and conflict, the family-based, plural language of the text (brothers/sisters, we, us, together, one another) simply refuses to support the solo Christian motif so present in our culture today.  Is this way of thinking understandable?  Absolutely.  Is it acceptable?  No, not according to Hebrews 10.  When Jesus calls us to Himself, for better or for worse, He calls us to each other. 

More importantly however, I want you to listen to how the passage begins and ends.  The passage begins with great emphasis on the access we have to God through Jesus.  We can enter God’s presence with confidence because of Jesus’ death and resurrection.  After beginning with this focus, look how quickly the author of Hebrews turns a corner emphasizing the communal nature of life with God.  Let us draw near…  Let us hold…  Let us consider… 

After assuring us of the access we have to God in Christ, the text culminates with the command to keep doing life together and outright rejects the idea that gathering together is in some way optional.  Apparently, there were some who saw their access to God in Christ as granting them the permission to stop meeting together.  The writer of Hebrews finds this line of reasoning unacceptable.  Why in the world would the freedom we have in Jesus lead us to live apart from each other?

Essentially the author of Hebrews makes this plea: don’t let your access to God lead you to cut yourself off from the people of God. 

God didn’t give us access to Himself so that we’d grow further apart from each other, but so that through our access to Him we’d experience unity and love with each other that was simply impossible without him. 

This call to continue meeting together doesn’t mandate that we meet in a specific place – the place could be anything from church building, a tattoo parlor, a parking lot, or the beach – but it does mandate that because of the access we have to God through Jesus, we continue meeting together somewhere.

This is what I learned in that year or so apart from the church. 

I realized that as great as those times of worship were in my car, and as real as my time studying God’s word was, and as wonderful as the relationships were that I’d formed over coffee and in small groups, there was something about meeting together somewhere with God’s messy, Spirit-filled children to learn how to do life together as God's agents of blessing that was simply indispensable and irreplaceable.

Do our worship gatherings have to be in a brick-and-mortar sanctuary?  No, they do not.  Does it have to be on Sunday mornings?  Not at all.  But they do have to be somewhere, at some time, with some people who are committed to learning how to do life with Jesus together. 

God didn’t pour out his Spirit upon us so that we’d pull away from each other.  He didn’t fill us with His Spirit so we could forsake meeting together.  He didn’t fill us with His Spirit so we could live in our own little spiritual silos on our terms.  He poured out His spirit upon us so that through our union with Jesus, we’d grow closer to each other than we’d ever dreamed possible.  Here’s what Jesus prayed would happen through our commitment to each other in Christ:

“I am praying not only for these disciples, but also for all who will ever believe in me through their message.  I pray that they will all be one, just as you and I are one—as you are in me, Father, and I am in you.  And may they be in us so that the world will believe you sent me. ~ John 17:21 (NIV)

That’s how important it is that we continue meeting together somewhere.  That’s how important it is we do life – real life – loving, sacrificial, meaningful, messy life together.  Our shared life together and the world coming to faith are interconnected.

I don’t know how it all works.  I don't know why it works.  All I know is that Jesus says there’s something about our commitment to each other in Him that helps the world see God in us and come to faith.

If we want to help the world to come to faith, there is a form of unity, a commitment to Jesus and each other the world must see.  And it seems to me, at the very least, this means we’ve got to keep meeting together somewhere – for the glory of God and the sake of the world.