Why I Go To Church

I’m going to go to church later. Why do I go to church? I go to church because it’s where I find out how I am supposed to be me. If I define my self as a child of God, I can’t just leave it at that. Which God? Evan saying the Christian God is not saying enough. Evan I don’t know fully what I mean when I say God.

Who shall know the mind of God? His ways are not our ways. He works in mysterious ways. A New Testament theologian friend of mine says God is other.

It’s about finding the answers through community, an agreed upon way of living. I’ve always said I’m a world-class rationalizer. I can come up with a plausible explanation or reason for anything I might decide to do or believe. I need other people to keep me in check, to check the congruity between how I’m living, how I think I’m living, and how I say I want to live.

If I say I want to follow Christ, and Christ says I’m supposed to die to myself and I’m yelling at my wife because I’m angry she’s not listening to me, something is off. It doesn’t matter if I’m accurate about my assessment of the situation, weather my wife is listening to me or not, that’s beside the point. The question should be, “Am I dying to myself?”

If I wasn’t trying to be a Christian, there may be other questions to ask first, but the claim I make is I am. Given that, I need to look at my life through the right filter. It gets muddy during the week as I go about my business, getting splashed by the rest of the world. I go to church to get some soap and water an elbow grease to keep the filter clean.