According to a recent Gallup poll about 20% of the people participate in a faith community essentially every week. That’s down from 32% in 2002.  Interesting data. Apparently, people don’t find participation in a faith community all that important..

I get it, at least in part.  Getting up and out the door on Sunday can be challenging, and watching on-line doesn’t work for everyone.  If you don’t know people, going to church services and events can feel like you’re all alone in a crowd. Sometimes even the best preacher preaches a so-so sermon, and there’s always that whisper in the back of the mind that says, “I can do this on my own, I don’t need these other people.”

There was a time in my life when my personal spiritual practices fed my soul and getting the kids to Sunday School was difficult. I questioned whether it was all that important. Eventually I realized that we needed to be with people who were different from us to make us remember that our way wasn’t the only way, or even close to the best way. Being part of a spiritual community broadens our understanding of God and stretches our love to be more like God’s love for us.

C.S. Lewis expresses these thoughts in a more entertaining and pointed way than I can. This comes from the collection of essays called, God in the Dock.

My own experience is that when I first became a Christian, about fourteen years ago, I thought that I could do it on my own, by retiring to my rooms and reading theology, and I wouldn’t go to the churches and Gospel Halls; and then later I found that it was the only way of flying your flag; and, of course, I found that this meant being a target. It is extraordinary how inconvenient to your family it becomes for you to get up early to go to Church. It doesn’t matter so much if you get up early for anything else, but if you get up early to go to Church it’s very selfish of you and you upset the house. If there is anything in the teaching of the New Testament which is in the nature of a command, it is that you are obliged to take the Sacrament, and you can’t do it without going to Church. I disliked very much their hymns, which I considered to be fifth-rate poems set to sixth-rate music. But as I went on I saw the great merit of it. I came up against different people of quite different outlooks and different education, and then gradually my conceit just began peeling off. I realized that the hymns (which were just sixth-rate music) were, nevertheless, being sung with devotion and benefit by an old saint in elastic-side boots in the opposite pew, and then you realize that you aren’t fit to clean those boots. It gets you out of your solitary conceit.

Who is your “old saint in elastic-side boots” who helps you grow just by being themself?  Who might see you as their old saint?