The emphAsis on the wrong SyllAble..

When I was a young pastor with much to learn and too much hubris, an experienced pastor took me aside and told me this advice that was given him when he was my age.  He said, A homegoing pastor makes for a churchgoing people.  For a time I took it to heart.  There were mixed results.  Too often the people I visited thought I was there for money and pulled out the checkbook as soon as I arrived.  That was one way to end the conversation.  Some folks thought I was the harbinger of bad news and thought that someone had failed to tell them they were dying (sooner than expected) and so they sent the pastor.  Others thought it was for coffee talk and not spiritual talk and kept moving the conversation back to the light and polite banter of a kaffee klatch.  Only a few understood why I was there.  But I kept up with it -- at least until the times changed.

I began to recognize that people were using their homes differently.  This became profoundly evident in the past decade or so -- especially in the wake of the pandemic.  The home is no longer a place where you bring people to visit or eat or both.  It has become more like a refuge away from people and job and the messiness and busyiness of life.  People are not quick to welcome a visit from the pastor because it means cleaning up the house and ordering their stuff to present an image and they do not have time or the desire to do that.  So now I meet most people in my office at church or at a coffee place or for breakfast or lunch.  It works.  It is a different form of a living room or dining room but it does the job.  The nice thing about it is that we all know the time is limited and so we generally get down to business faster.

It is not that I have given up on the old saying.  Pastors need to be in the lives of their people and familiar faces and voices to the people they serve.  But the emphasis should be on the other side -- not the work of the pastor bringing the church, as it were, to the home but the work of the people bringing their homes (and families, more precisely) to church.  A churchgoing people makes for a stronger home and congregation.  We ought to be encouraging the churchgoing part more than the homegoing part of the pastor.  If you say you believe and belong, then you need to be where the people of God gather.  It should not be an occasional or special activity but the ordinary routine of your week and your life.  We go to church on Sunday morning.  That is simply who we are.

Why is it we need to beg or cajole or argue with or threaten the people of God to go to church?  It is the wrong pathology.  Absence does not make the heart grow fonder.  Worshiping less frequently and receiving the Sacrament less often do not make your time in worship or the Sacrament more special but just the opposite.  These things become alien and foreign parts of your lives and the things easiest to disappear from that life when it gets too busy or too stressful or too easy.  So if you are reading this, let me encourage you.  Don't wait for a visit from the pastor or a phone call or an email.  Get yourself where you belong!  Be in the Lord's House on the Lord's Day around the Lord's Word and the Lord's Table.  Worship is not the special activity for an occasion but the regular and routine of the lives of the people of God.  Just in case you did not know, Christmas is coming and it should not be the first time you made it into God's House.  Come in Advent to start up the new habit.  If you wait until Christmas, let that be the start of a new weekly habit.