I’ve decided to start my series with a pretty basic question. What is the point of church attendance? Is it important, and if so, in what way? What are the benefits to the individuals and to the church? Which of the Church’s missions does it fulfill? What are the side effects of attending less quantity of church now (with an accompanying increase in “at home” study responsibility)? Does this mean that there is now less focus on church attendance than before?
One of the first things I said we would look at is how each topic fits under the three-fold mission of the Church. Clearly the “big” mission of the Church is to bring people to Christ. The three supporting missions are:
- Preach the gospel
- Perfect the Saints
- Redeem the dead
I usually think of the three-fold mission of the Church as three target audiences: potential converts, existing members and dead people. Activities and programs that relate to temples are mostly (IMO) about the dead, or at least that’s the direct purpose (plus lots of side benefits to the organization). Missions are most directly for the purpose of winning converts (but also with very important side benefits in terms of increasing member commitment, etc.). Using this logic, the primary purpose of Church Attendance is the second one, perfecting the Saints. While it includes preaching the gospel, it’s primarily preaching to the converted, an insider audience.
As to how well church attendance perfects the Saints and brings them to Christ, that’s one point of today’s discussion. Does attending church bring us closer to Christ and help us become more perfect disciples?
Home vs. Church
First, a quick look at some history. People didn’t always attend church regularly. Attendance tracking as we see it today is a byproduct of the Reformation rather than a feature of early Christianity. The Lateran Council of 1215 was the first attempt by the Christian church to legislate church attendance, requiring at least annual attendance (!), although we have to note two caveats: 1) the council was making clerical reforms more than laity (even more of a “!” about annual attendance in that case), and 2) the Church was a huge, integral part of everyday life in a community, not just a matter of Sunday attendance. Anything you wanted to do involved the Church in some way. Plus, there were no competing congregations throughout most of history in the majority of communities. Pluralistic societies were the exception (although they certainly happened–including in Jesus and Paul’s time–throughout history).
Going back to ancient Israel, there wasn’t “church attendance” as there is now, and private worship in the home was viewed with a clerical eye of skepticism. From William Dever’s book Did God Have a Wife (and from the Old Testament) we learn that many households had gods and goddesses in them for worship, primarily related to domestic concerns like childbirth and health of the family. It is common throughout history for homes to be a locus of worship in addition to a centralized worship space (and sometimes in competition with the centralized space). In many faiths, the home includes a shrine or prayer place for daily, routine worship needs. Even in the iconoclastic Reformation, reading a prayer book in the home was expected, along with reading the Bible (an important feature of the Reformation).
Church attendance has always been a way to balance or at times to combat domestic or private worship. The new shift away from more time in church instruction and toward more home-based worship is a way to increase private devotion while maintaining church-sponsored indoctrination. However, the church still creates the home-based guide. Private devotion and study may be in this instance replaced by church-mandated study (since there are only so many hours in the day). Which is the anchor point for our current program–private devotion or bringing correlated materials into existing private devotion? Clearly, this shift shows that church-driven indoctrination is more important to the Church than private devotional study, despite less time being spent at the meeting house.
WWOCD? (What Would Other Churches Do?)
Other churches don’t have the same articulated three-fold mission that we do. In Googling articles about Church attendance, what you are likely to find (as I did) is that church attendance is not necessarily for the same purpose in most Churches with a strong online discussion presence (a lot of Evangelical churches, natch). These churches use attendance to measure their success at getting butts in seats every Sunday (as well as presumably more cha-ching in the collection plate [1]), and there are a lot of arguments about how best to do that, many of which are focused around the medium and the music. Their target audience is mainly the “unchurched.” By contrast, the Mormon Church’s [2] lessons and talks are for insiders, those who already believe.
As a former missionary, I can attest that our lessons and meetings require a lot of explanation to outsiders. We certainly say “Visitors Welcome” and we do invite investigators, but if we had some large group of non-LDS people show up out of the blue, they and we would all be bewildered. We use a lot of jargon and rote answers and unique lesson styles that might perplex outsiders. Even the unwritten dress code can be off-putting to those not familiar with our style of worship.
In fact, we quickly notice when someone is an outsider because they try to participate in ways that don’t quite fit our customary approach. For example, when a woman shouts “Amen” during your talk, you can bet she’s a visitor or investigator or otherwise an outsider. When someone sings part of a song during their testimony or doesn’t end with “In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen,” you know that person is not a member. Say what you will, the target audience of our church services are existing church members.
Many of the online discussions (again, mostly Evangelicals) I’ve seen have this audience question in mind, and it’s a marketing question: why do people attend any church, and how can we attract them to ours? Those questions aren’t a very Mormon dialogue for a few reasons. First, everything is run through headquarters and consistency is required; we don’t have the freedom at the local level to change the type of music, artwork, messages, lessons, talks, etc. to any significant degree. There’s no “rock and roll” ward with a jumbotron competing with the folksy mom and pop ward down the street.
Second, we don’t really care if people like it. If they don’t like it, well, they are the problem and they are only hurting themselves–that’s the party line, anyway. If you’re offended, you are the bad person. If you don’t find church uplifting or interesting, you’re not spiritual enough. We might put on a show of shaking our heads sadly that you are so recalcitrant that you would deny yourself blessings rather than attend church, but we really don’t feel any responsibility to change that situation. Our tools to do so are limited, and we are not empowered to make changes.
So What’s the Point?
So if the point of church attendance is not to invite non-members (or preach the gospel), what is the point? If it’s to perfect the Saints, how does church attendance perfect the Saints?
- Creating a sense of community. Without church attendance, who’s going to show up at your funeral? Who’s going to bring you a meal when you are sick? Who’s going to care about your kids’ achievements? There are things that only a ward family can accomplish.
- Providing gospel instruction / indoctrination. Without church attendance, members might believe what they actually believe, and not what we want them to believe. Every church creates its own Overton Window of acceptable discourse.
- Domesticating the Family. People attend church to keep the family on the straight and narrow, particularly children, but also spouses. In fact, many church members see a spouse leaving the church as justification to leave their spouse. That’s putting a lot of onus on the church’s role in our lives. You can hear this reason at play when people say “I know, I just know that if I weren’t in the church, I’d be off doing [insert hedonistic self-destructive behavior of choice.] The church has literally saved my life.”
- Connecting to the divine. Church attendance can be a respite from the workaday week, a way to feel the Spirit, to ponder the eternal, a touch stone to our spiritual side.
- Connecting to a grander purpose. This is different than the peaceful respite people seek from their harried lives or the reminder of the divine spark within them. This one relates to the good we are supposed to do as Christians, doing acts of service for others, caring about people and listening to their concerns. There’s something grand about sitting in church and listening to the human stories being shared, the course our lives take, knowing people at all stages of life and different economic levels and backgrounds, and finding ways to lift one another’s burdens or otherwise feel like a cog in the great machine.
Those are a few reasons people find church attendance compelling. The church clearly cares a lot about church attendance since lack of weekly attendance can get you kicked out of BYU or denied a temple recommend. But with those two exceptions, church attendance varies with no real consequences. Wards that are short staffed on callings are particularly forgiving of a weak attendance record.
I read an interesting article by Carey Nieuwhof about the ongoing discussion in megachurches trying to grow a congregation. The article points out that people don’t really need to attend church anymore because they can get uplifting content and music through online sermons, and people are more interested if there are opportunities to connect to service. Only people who are engaged attend church in the long term, and as Pastor Carey puts it: “You don’t attend church. You are the church.”
He decries the consumer model that so many modern Evangelical congregations are built around, that if you create exciting and entertaining content, people will show up. That’s a valid point since church isn’t exactly the place I go for exciting or entertaining content. If I were there to be entertained, I would have quit going a long time ago. I wouldn’t mind being entertained, but it seldom happens or at least it pales in comparison to actual good entertainment I experience routinely. Of course, his article on the short-sightedness of a consumer-focused church ends with a sales pitch for his Church Growth MasterClass. Classic.
On the one hand, the Mormon church does a better job of engaging its members by ensuring we all have, hopefully meaningful, callings and responsibilities that tie us to church attendance. But if those callings don’t feel like they are accomplishing something related to a Christian commitment, then our engagement can be a casualty. And what people find meaningful and purposeful can vary from person to person. Sometimes that’s because they lack vision (without which, the people perish, yes, yes), but sometimes it’s because we give them dumb assignments nobody really cares about, doing busywork. Or because the thing we gave them to do just isn’t their jam.
I found another article that was even better from CNN, outlining the results from a pew survey of 10 reasons people attend church, and 9 reasons they quit attending. People were allowed to choose more than one reason. Here’s why they said they attend:
- To become closer to God. (81%)
- So their children will have a moral foundation. (69%)
- To become a better person. (68%)
- For comfort in times of trouble or sorrow. (66%)
- They find the sermons valuable. (59%)
- To be part of a faith community. (57%)
- To continue their family’s religious traditions. (37%)
- They feel obligated to go. (31%)
- To meet new people or socialize. (19%)
- To please their family, spouse or partner. (16%)
Who are these spouse-pleasers? Predictably, mostly men claiming their wives are dragging them to church. Reason #7 reminds me of a joke Todd Glass made. He said “You wouldn’t wear a pair of jeans your parents picked out. Why would you go to a church they chose?”[3]
Less predictable is that most of those who quit attending on the survey were middle-aged women, not men. If churches aren’t pleasing to middle aged women, just who is the target audience? Here are their reasons:
- They practice their faith in “other ways.” (37%)
- They are not believers. (28%)
- No reason is “very important.” (26%)
- They haven’t found a house of worship they like. (23%)
- They don’t like the sermons. (18%)
- They don’t feel welcome. (14%)
- They don’t have the time. (12%)
- Poor health or mobility. (9%)
- No house of worship in their area. (7%)
Women were more likely than men to claim that their reasons (for attendance or quitting) were complicated and to choose multiple options. The majority of respondents (70%) who quit attending but believed in religion still affiliated with a denomination. In Mormon terms, we would call them inactive, but still consider them part of an assigned congregation.
Most of the reasons on the second list could easily be distilled by most Mormon wards into “they were offended,” and therefore easily dismissed (both the reason and the person, in one easy move). That’s a shame because we certainly aren’t learning how to be less offensive disciples of Christ with that self-congratulatory attitude. The majority of middle-way Mormons I know would probably agree with things on both the “reason they attend” and “reasons they don’t attend” list, and it’s revealing that not everything on the first list is positive. About half of those reasons are pretty weak sauce, attending for other people or a sense of duty or coercion.
My own perspective is that the more we stick to the mission of bringing people to Christ, the more everything else will shake out. When church strays from the mission of bringing people to Christ, the most common reason on the Pew survey disappears.
- What do you think the point of church attendance is?
- Do some of these reasons resonate for you?
- If you have stopped attending, what reasons quit compelling you?
- Do you think church attendance matters to a person’s spiritual life? In what ways? If not, why not?
Discuss.
[1] I certainly don’t think they are just looking for money, but that is one very useful way to measure the effectiveness of your Christian reach and message.
[2] Look, I’m 51 years old, and this is a lot faster to type than The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. This one feels like a dumb change to me. So sue me.
[3] It’s a funny point, but church is probably more related to legacy, and while I do have several really old pairs of jeans, none of them are multi-generational.
Wheat & Tares 
Maybe some among the early Christian saints wondered about the point of their weekly gatherings. The writer of Hebrews wrote,
Having therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus, By a new and living way, which he hath consecrated for us, through the veil, that is to say, his flesh; And having an high priest over the house of God; Let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience, and our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold fast the profession of our faith without wavering; (for he is faithful that promised;) And let us consider one another to provoke unto love and to good works: Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is; but exhorting one another: and so much the more, as ye see the day approaching.
I think that Christian worship has always had a communal nature. Our communal worship is less formal than that of some others, but there are common elements: we gather together, we pray together, we sing together, we partake of the emblems together, we hear exhortation together, we bear one another’s burdens together — all of this is Christian worship. While I might get something out of it, it isn’t all about me — it’s about me becoming part of something bigger than myself.
I think a couple of choices that could be added to the list of Mormon reasons for attending include “it’s a commandment” and “to take the sacrament, every week,” an item that has received more attention in the last generation.
I find it an odd realization that LDS services are totally directed to insiders, whereas many Christian services are at least in part if not totally directed to outsiders, the unchurched. That’s doubly surprising because there is such a missionary focus in the LDS Church. Recent changes have apparently eliminated the investigator class, aka Gospel Essentials, which was the only thing on Sunday that was tailored for non-LDS visitors.
Historically, consider that initially Mormons built temples, then in the early Utah period they build tabernacles, and it wasn’t until well into the Mormon experience, say late 19th-century, that chapels became the primary focus of church building efforts and LDS devotional life. So even with the LDS experience “dress up like it’s 1950 and go to church in a chapel on Sunday, every Sunday, except for General Conference and Stake Conference” took a long time to emerge as the standard plan.
I feel like its a cycle of feeling obligated to serve–whether intrinsically as a believer, or in response to temple covenants–and social pressure (or more positively, shared community). I have to ruefully note that serving in Primary has utterly sapped me and my wife’s interest in attending church. Not so say that there haven’t been wonderful moments here and there, but the notion of feeling spiritually fed at church hasn’t been with us when we’ve been in that calling.
I think it’s more a communal thing than anything else. Sitting in sacrament listening to the same (generally poorly delivered) talks on the same subjects I’ve been hearing for thirty years doesn’t help me get close to god. But seeing friends and checking in with people and asking what I can do to help them feels right. I don’t think I’m usually spiritually fed at church, but I am emotionally fed on some level and that keeps me coming back. And I second Dave B.’s observations about how we spend most of our time preaching to the choir, so to speak. If we were less insular, I think we’d get bigger, more diverse crowds in sacrament meeting, thus coming closer to the example of Christ’s form of ministering.
I have been asking this question since the 2-hour block was introduced. Of course we attend Sacrament Meeting for the Sacrament. However, if your calling does not take place on Sunday,—e.g. teaching or leadership— why attend Sunday School or Relief Society/Elder’s Quorum? I have been attending RS regularly for 14 years straight due to the nature of my callings and I am tired of RS lessons. Same teachers, same topics, same comments. Yawn. I would much rather study on my own at home. But! I have a spouse who would be very disappointed if I didn’t attend, I have a 15-year old to be a good example to, and I have 20-something year-old children who would be confused that I have stopped attending. So I continue to attend, sit on the back row, and sometimes do my own study on my phone. By the way, I’m a middle-aged woman. 😉
I think it’s worth using the updated four purposes of the Church and include caring for the poor and needy in the purposes of Church attendance. We’re it not for attending Church, I’m not sure I would ever associate with people in a significantly different financial situation than my own family. Knowing people who struggle allows us to help lift each other up. Association at Church, inspires to serve, builds empathy, and provides opportunities to lift each other up economically as well as spiritually.
Hawk, aren’t there 4 missions? Isn’t the 4th to assist the poor and needy? For me, this is the most important mission of the Church. I’m not excited about helping the dead. And if we help those in need won’t that help “perfect the saints”? Couldn’t service be integrated into our church services. For example, couldn’t each Ward have a sister Branch from a developing country? Might not the cultural and development possibilities be fun and productive?
Roger, yes there are 4 missions of the church, although the 4th was a late addition. What’s interesting is that the 4th is both the true Christian mandate and the least focused on direct benefit to the church. The target audience is anyone in need! Not boosting our numbers through baptisms of dead, living and family members.
I go because I like it. It doesn’t need a point. I also enjoy lupine, lilac and chocolate. No points there, either, so far as I know.
Catholics attend Mass because 1.) it’s a one of God’s commandments, “Remember keep holy the Sabbath; 2) because Jesus commanded “Do this (the Eucharist) in memory of me and it is in the Mass that the Eucharist is celebrated; and 3) Catholic Church states that “You shall attend Mass on Sundays and holy days of obligation and rest from servile labor.” The Eucharistic is a supper, and therefore a communal celebration “where two or three are gathered in my name, there I alm also.”
I tried to post this comment yesterday but its still not showing.
“I’ve decided to start my series with a pretty basic question. What is the point of church attendance? ” And yet your entire article completely left out the basic reason why we go to church.
THE SACRAMENT!! To renew our covenants with God. The updated meeting schedule and talks given about it in conference have made this extremely clear. The s sacrament is the reason and the pinnacle of our weekly church attendance.
“What are the benefits to the individuals and to the church?”
This question should be
“What are the benefits of the sacrament to the individuals and to the church?”
From Handbook 2 (everyone has access to it in the gospel library app)
“The primary purpose of sacrament meeting is for Church members to remember the Savior by partaking of the sacrament. Members renew their commitment to take upon them His name, always remember Him, and keep His commandments. This ordinance is the center of members’ worship on the Sabbath.”
Also it is important to point out that for a decade now we have had a 4th mission of the church.
It is no longer just perfect the saints, proclaim the gospel, and redeem the dead.
It is now perfect the saints, proclaim the gospel, redeem the dead, and care for the poor and needy.
https://www.ksl.com/article/8984614
This article really should be completely rewritten as it completely fails to answer the author the question the author posed in the title of the article.
No disrespect intended, but I go because I have to relieve myself at least once a week.
Scripturallythinking: how does the sacrament not fall under the category of “Connecting with the Divine”? If that’s not what it is, why not just make your own tiny bread and water snack at home. It seems like you are being oddly specific in your requirement that “the sacrament” be its own spelled out reason vs the broader category I used that clearly covers it.
@Angela C The sacrament is THE reason for church. Anything else is just a nice side dish.
Again from the quote I previously used from the Handbook 2 “This ordinance is the center of members’ worship on the Sabbath.”
If it is the CENTER of our sabbath worship then you cannot categorize it under something else.
Zak Baker: I’ll bite if that’s the discussion you want to have. Why is the sacrament the reason for church? For whom? What does the sacrament accomplish in the lives of people that they can ONLY get through that? (FTR, I am not disputing that the sacrament is “THE” reason we go to church, and you can’t attend this church for 50+ years without knowing that party line.) To me, as I’ve said that’s because it’s how we connect with the divine. If there’s a different reason I’ve missed, feel free to add it to the comments. I suppose you could make the case that people feel forgiven for their sins, covenants renewed, but that just brings us to the next set of questions of why we attend.
If you don’t know what I’m asking, here’s a question I’ve raised about the sacrament before (being tongue in cheek): if that’s the entire reason we go to church, then why don’t we let people (under normal circumstances) do the sacrament at home)? Why don’t we have drive thru sacrament? What’s important about the church attendance part? If the Sacrament is the entire reason we go to church, why don’t we have a 15 minute church?
The question was “What’s the point of Church attendance?” so if the sacrament is THE ONLY reason, then that’s the next logical question. Why not scrap the rest of it? Is there something to the rest of it or the location or the communal aspect?
I’ve been a member my whole life, but in the last year have started spending 2 weeks a month at other denominations. The reasons for attending in different places are very different:
The reasons why I attend LDS services are mostly related to taking the sacrament, and having made a purposeful decision to remain active in the LDS church: something along the lines of “I’m supposed to be there.” I like to be part of a faith community.
I attend other denominations when I need to connect to the divine. I find LDS services and the social requirements to participate in lessons, teach classes, and socialize in the hallway can be stressful and distracting every week. I also find that other denominations tend to be more Christ-centered, and I can only take so many sacrament talks about missionary work, girl’s camp, and self-reliance when I need to be spiritually uplifted.
It’s been a switch, but I’m getting comfortable having different spiritual needs met by creating a church mashup.
I think, for me, I go for the sacrament and the fellowship. (And cuz I am the last organist in the ward, lol) I dont always stay for the rest, depends on who is teaching, we have some great teachers that make me think and some not so much.
The home study often leads me into my own tangents for study. Which, frankly, if it didnt, they could be done in less than an hour a week. I appreciate the starting point, and I enjoy discussing the lessons with my family, hearing what everyone else has learned. Even my inactive daughter joins in on occasion, and I like that she doesnt mind the gospel discussion with her family.
At Ohio State new student orientation today, my student tour guide learned that I had studied philosophy in college. Excited, he said in earnest, “I’m trying to figure out the meaning of life. Do you know what it is?”
My answer: “The more I live, the more I’m convinced that the most important thing in life, the only thing that really matters, is that we learn how to be kind to and help the people around us.”
At the end of the day, this is the reason we go to church. We don’t go for a typically terrible sacrament meeting talk or a correlated Sunday School lesson or an echo chamber priesthood/Relief Society discussion. We go to see our brothers and sisters, not just to see them, but to see their needs that hopefully we can serve them or that we can be served by them.
Mtodd, I agree with the general idea of your comment, but I think that as Church members we need to identify with a wider world than just our local members. This is what I find severely missing from local services. Opportunities for wider engagement.
The Sacrament is important to me, but is not something I feel I need every Sunday. I know the doctrine, I don’t need constant reminders. What I do need is help being a better global citizen. Isn’t that Christ’s ultimate message: help the world become a better place.
I go simply for an hour of peace and quiet….and maybe a little serene music. That is all.