\{hf, Go to Church?

Lloyd Geering
ne hundred years ago many churches displayed
such notices as "Public Worship: 11 am and 6.30
pm". The weekly practice of going to church was
officially referred to as public worship. It was the people's
worship of God. In those days at least half of the population
were at church on any given Sunday. The church I went to
in the late 1930s, First Church Dunedin, had a thousand
members, two choirs, five Bible classes, and a flourishing
Sunday School. But today, even though two other congregations have united with it since then, no more attend church
there than here in Tawa. Only 8% of New Zealanders go to
church today. It can no longer be called 'public worship',
for the public does not attend.
So "\A4ry go to church?" is clearly a pertinent question
to ask ourselves. \A/hy are we here this morning? I shall not
embarrass you by asking you to share your answer with us,
but I shall tell you mine. I begin by exploring how churchgoing started in the first place.
Of course, it has not always been known as 'churchgoing'. That is a very modern term. You may think this weekly
gathering started with Christianity. Not sol To find its origins we must go back twenty-six centuries to the land we
now call Iraq, sometime between 550 and 400 scn. And it
all started because ofa cultural catastrophe.

At the beginning of the sixth century before

the
Christian era the expanding Babylonian Empire conquered

the Holy Land and carried off as prisoners the cream of

Jewish society. The royal family, the aristocracy, the priests,
and the educated classes were all taken from their homeland and resettled in the city of Babylon, at that time the
most sophisticated city in the world.
That should have been the end of the Jewish people,
but quite the contrary occurred: this national catastrophe
triggered off amazing cultural creativity among theJewish
exiles. Although the details of this creativity have not been
preserved, we have only to compare theJews who went into
exile with those who came out of it to see the difference.
It is from the time in between that we date the worship of
One God, the beginnings of Holy Scripture, and the weekly
gathering on the seventh day. The Jews went into exile as
displaced citizens of the kingdom ofJudea; not long after

This serrnon was deliveredJuly 13,2014 at Tawa Union Church,

Wellington, New Zealand

their exile they had spread around the ancient world,

united by the common faith we callJudaism.
The hidden beginnings ofJudaism are reflected in an
ancient psalm from that time: 'By the waters of Babylon,
we sat down and wept when we remembered Zion' (Ps
137:l) . Out of that practice of gathering together to weep and
remember, a new faith was born and a new type of religious
institution to house it. It was unlike any to be found hitherto. From this simple gathering together there evolved
the institution of the sflagogue. That's a Greek word that
literally means 'gathering together'. The institution of the
synagogue has not only survived to this day, but it became
the prototype, first of the church and later of the mosque.
As the Jewish exiles gathered together and remembered, they compiled their traditions and sagas into one
continuous story called the Torah. They did more than
just record the past; they prefaced their much older stories
with a new creation story: the one in the first chapter of
the Bible, which was composed in Babylon. It was the first
attempt to compose what today's scientists call a 'Theory of
Everything'. It was so brilliantly simple that it remained convincing until less than two hundred years ago. Moreover, it
explained why we should take a rest every seventh day: it's
because that is what God did after creating the world.
Thus began the practice by which Jews have gathered
together on the seventh day of the week to read the Torah,
Christians on the first day of the week to read the Bible, and
Muslims on the sixth day of the week to read the Qur'an.
This new kind of religious institution was not led by
priests but by scribes and scholars. The syrragogue is not
a temple housing the presence of God, but a place of
study housing a community. It has been referred to as a
'layperson's institute'. In the Jewish slrragogue, the rabbi

is a scholar and teacheq not a priest. The chief officer

of a mosque, the imam, is a scholar, not a priest. For the
first two or three Christian centuries the chief officers in
the churches were not called priests but bishops, presbyters, and deacons, words that in Greek mean 'overseers',
'elders', and'seryers'.
The institution of the Christian church grew out of the
s)rylagogue, not the temple. The first churches were simply
Christian slrragogues, doing much the same thing when
they gathered together as what theJews did. They read and
studied the scriptures, they prayed, and they shared a common meal of bread and wine.

tury. We in the churches may not have noticed, but this

word is rarely heard these days outside of church circles.
Back in the sixties some theologians announced 'God is
dead'. What they meant was that the idea of God was going
out of use. As an Oxford theologian observed some thirty
years ago, 'People once knew, or thought they knew, what
they meant when they spoke of C,od, and they spoke of him
often. Now in the course of a day's business we may not mention him at all. The name of God seems to have been retired
from everyday discourse.' Let me illustrate it
this way. Long ago when two people parted
tO ChUfCh iS
they said, 'God be with you', a wish that in

Of course, during the many centuries of the last two

millennia the activities in slmagogue, church, and mosque
have evolved differently, so that today, to the casual
observeq they look very different from each other. But
when all the later developments are stripped away we find
the same basic components in all three: a coming together
of people to celebrate what they have inherited. They read
their communal story in their sacred scriptures, they pray,
and they socialise.

I have briefly sketched the origin of

churchgoing that we may better distinguish
GOing
between the essentials and non-essentials.
,Goodbye,. Now
The first important thing is this: going to not primarily a matter ti-. b..r-. shorrened to
we sT 'Have a good day'.
church is not primarily a matter of entering Of entefing A hOly
This shift in our language led another
a holy building, but ofjoining a gatherin1 ,^.rirr^^^ L^.1
^r,^r^^r^^^
joining ,h."i;;;", Don cupitt, to make a study of
of people. This building is called a church building, but of
because of the people who gather in it. We,
a gathering of people. our everyday discourse to discover what was
happening. He found that as the word 'God'
not this building, are the church of Tawa.
was disappearing it was being replaced by
So coming to church means sharing the life
an increased use of another word: 'Life'. Cupitt found that
of a community.
today we use a great number of phrases about life, some of
Before going on to discuss the waywe share in this comthem quite new. 'Don't waste your life'; 'I want to get on with
munity, let us simply note the value of meeting together
life'; 'Such is life!'; 'That's what life's all about'; 'C,et a life!'
regularly. Quite recently some atheists have discovered
He called his book The Neut Religion of Li,fe. As religion has
that they were missing something by no longer coming to
become secular, life has become sacred, and so what used
church. They felt they had thrown out the baby with the
to be called 'the worship of God' is now more appropriately
bathwater. As recently as January of 2014 two professional
described as'the celebration of life'.
comedians, Sanderson Jones and Pippa Evans, called a
That is just what the Sunday Assembly movement is trymeeting in a deconsecrated church in North London.
ing to re-establish-the celebration of life-and to do so in
Three hundred people turned up. They decided to meet
a mutually supportive community. That is what the ancient
twice a month and move to the larger premisses of Conway
Hall, where six hundred turned up. They called themJewish exiles started. And that is why I too go to church. It
raise
half
a
milis to celebrate life. It is to sort out and examine the values
selves the Sunday Assembly and set out to
by which I live so that I can live life to the full. I do this by
lion pounds to spread their intentions. As a result of their
learning about my cultural past and how I came to be what
efforts, by April of this year Sunday Assemblies had sprung
I am. This is what'the worship of God' means in this greatly
up in thirty cities, fourteen in the UI! twelve in the USA,
changed world.
and six in Australia. Their vision is to establish a congregaPerhaps you feel confused bywhat I say. Well, we live in
tion in every town, city, and village that wants one, and they
a very confusing world, and the particular ways in which our
expect to have one hundred Assemblies by the end of this
Christian forebears sorted things out will just not do any
yeaL
more. We are very like those ancient Babylonian exiles who
What do they do? They socialise, they sing, they lisgathered together to bewail the loss of their past. But also
ten to addresses. They aim to provide inspiring, thoughtlike them we have to be creative. As they found themselves
provoking, and practical ideas that help people to live the
confused by sophisticated Babylon, so we find ourselves in
lives they waRt to lead and be the people they want to be.
a world of accelerating changes, some of which we deplore
Their motto is: liae better, help ofien, wonder more. They believe
and some we welcome. Human knowledge is exploding
that by meeting together they help one another achieve
at an exponential rate. Beliefs and practices are changing
this end. Aware of the shortness of life and the finality of
quite radically. The old absolutes on which we used to rely
death, they seek to get the most out of life and to help one
have dissolved. We often do not know what to believe any
another do it. In other words they celebrate life-but withmore and we do not know where to turn for security and
out reference to God.
certainty. That is why we need to come together and assist
For them the word 'God' has become a stumbling
one another to find answers.
block. That is very understandable. The idea that'God' is
Richard Rubenstein, an American rabbi, wrote a book
the name of a superhuman being who created the world
called After Auschwflz, in which he acknowledges the imposand still controls it became obsolete in the twentieth cen-

rI

sibility of believing in the traditional God ofJudaism after

the Nazi holocaust of the Jewish people. The God who
supposedly saved their ancestors on the shores of the Red
Sea had certainly failed to do so in the death camps of
Auschwitz and Belsen.
Rubenstein pondered the words of the young Lutheran
theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who before his execution
on the express command of Hitlec had written from his
prison cell, "People cannot be religious any more. How are
we to speak of God in a non-religious way?"
Richard Rubenstein responded, "Our problem is not
how shall we think of God in a secular way, but how to be
religious in the time of the death of God. FIow can people
best share the decisive crises of life, given the cold, unfeeling, indifferent cosmos that surrounds us." He concluded
that the reason why he still goes to the slrlagogue is this:
'Judaism is the way weJews share our lives in an unfeeling
and silent cosmos. It is the flickering candle we have lighted
in the dark to enlighten and to warm us." That is just what
theirJewish ancestors started to do in ancient Babylonl
This may offer a clue to those of us whose cultural roots

are

in the Christian tradition. Robert Bellah, a Christian

sociologist, published a book in 1970 called Bqond, BelieJ

He wrote: "People must work out their own ultimate solutions to the meaning of life. What the institutional church
can do is to provide the most favourable environment for

from slavery is one of the themes of the Bible. In church we

are truth seekers for, as the Fourth Gospel says, '*re truth
will make us free'.
Some may think it paradoxical and even embarrassing to have atheists reminding us of the value of meeting
together as a church, but I find that they have outlined in
a simple form the basic reasons why I go to church. It is to
celebrate life and to assist one another in making the most
of life, whether it be long or short. You no doubt all have
your own reasons for coming to church or you would not
be here. Perhaps you do not find my answer convincing.
Never mindl People have long had different reasons for
going to church. I have tried to explain as simply and honestly as I can why I still come to church. EIR
Sir Lloyd Geering (D.D., University of
Otago, New Zealand) is Emeritus Professor
of Religious Studies at Victoria University of
Wellington and former Principal of Knox
Theological College in Dunedin. He is the
author of many books including Rzimagining
God (2014) ar,d From the Big Bang to God,
(2013).

doing so, without imposing on them a prefabricated set of

answers."

Here then is a reason for coming to church. It's not to

be told the authoritative answers to the meaning of life. We
have to create our own answers. And this is a good place
for doing that. The purpose of going to church is so that,

like the ancient Jews in Babylon, we may come together,

acknowledge our predicament, and assist one another in
creating meaning for our lives. Meaning is not created out
of nothing, but out of the cultural and religious tradition
that has made us who we are. That is why here we read that
tradition, we hear sefinons, and we sing songs. The tradi-

tion does not provide us with ready-made answers but with

the material out of which we may create our own answers.

And that points to the difference between what we

do here and what others do in their Sunday Assemblies.
Whereas they make a break with the past and feel the need
to divorce themselves from it by refusing even to use the
word God, we gratefully acknowledge our past and continue to learn from it. That is why we still find it useful to
read the Bible when we come to church. When we acknowledge our Christian past, we better understand where we
came from and who we are.
But the process of owning our past does not mean we
are bound by it. Though we learn from it, we are not only
free to work things out for outselves, but are required to do
so. We are not enslaved by the past. Indeed, being released

'A treasure-trove of straight talk on the use and

misuse of the Pauline letters. Careful luei4