This is a piece I wrote a while ago, but I've had a few conversations with people recently about this important issue and so I've decided to pop it up on the blog. Please feel free to comment!
We live
now in a highly consumer focused culture, and this culture is seeping
into church life, and it seems that “church shopping” is becoming a common trap
for some Christians.
Is it
wrong then to worship regularly in more than one church?
As we might expect the Bible doesn’t address the subject of being
part of two (or more) different churches directly. Paul’s letter to the
Corinthians opens, “to God’s church in Corinth” (1 Corinthians 1:2), signifying one church, while in
Galatians Paul begins with “to the churches of Galatia” (Galatians 1:2), showing there was more than one in the
region. Today, however, with numerous local churches, the question of whether
it’s OK to attend more than one church on a regular basis does come up.
Firstly, it will help us if we are sure that we fully understand the purpose of
church attendance and/or membership. When Christians join together with a local
group of believers, we are following the model for the local church (check it
out in Acts 2:41-42): “They devoted themselves to the apostles'
teaching and to fellowship, and to sharing in meals (including the Lord’s
Supper), and to prayer.” Also we can see from Ephesians 4, that believers are meant to come together
as a tightly knit family to minister to one another, care for one another and
show commitment to one another using the gifts of the Holy Spirit to build up
one another in the faith.
The question really is this: can we honestly realistically and effectively
pray, have open fellowship, sit under teaching and authority of the word and
the eldership, and use our spiritual gifts if we’re not properly committed to a
single fellowship?
As the
Bible is silent on the issue, we must not be dictatorial about it. But what we
should do is address the issue of the motive; by that I mean what encourages
Christians to want to not be properly in fellowship with a single church but
rather to spread themselves across more than one, and what is the effect (or
effects) and consequence of that.
Sadly, it is often the case that people will decide they want to worship
somewhere else, at times, because that way they can just slip in and out
without any commitment or any need to give of themselves to others; another
reason may be that a person might be looking to pick or choose something
different from each church because they feel they can’t find one church that
gives them everything they “want”. The problem with these reasons is that each
one of them is counter to Christ’s teaching in scripture about what it is to
give to one another; they all have the mentality of “what can I get”, rather
than “what can I give”.
The
biblical truth is that we’re to be actively serving and ministering to
one another with the spiritual gift(s) we have received from the Spirit, and
when we avoid this by choosing to be absent or prioritising our preferences
over obedience to Christ, we can’t do that effectively. Besides this, it
will also show that we are not committed to the believers or the leadership in
any one church, and that’s both a feeble witness to others and makes it very
difficult to invite others to church .
While there may be legitimate reasons for someone to attend two or more
churches, this will generally only be when the local fellowship doesn’t
have an evening or mid-week service, or when there is a special service which
requires an individual’s attendance such as a dedication or baptism etc.
But
when it comes to absenting ourselves from a fellowships main worship service,
biblically it is very hard to justify and in practice, it is
hard to see how this could fully benefit either the believer or the local
churches he or she attends. The answer is not absence, it is rather full
immersion into a fellowship – that is the way of both blessing and being
blessed, it is the way of a deeper relationship, and a closer walk with Christ.
