My dear fellow Christian, please come back to church. Do it for your own sake and the sake of your fellow church members. The awkwardness of public-gatherings, COVID edition, may make those gatherings feel less meaningful, but they aren’t. Regardless of how it feels, if you are gathering with the body of Christ to sing and pray and read and listen and observe the ordinances, you are experiencing the ordinary means of grace. There is little else on this planet that is more meaningful or significant—and you can’t make it meaningful or significant, it just is.

In my last post, I wrote an open letter to the pastor who is tempted to simply live-stream his church’s entire service without resuming physical gatherings. In this post, I write an open letter to Christians who are tempted to stay home and watch services online.

Dear Christian,

We are halfway through 2020 and I’d say right now we are in desperate need of a half-time motivational pep-talk. I know I am not alone in feeling like this year has beat the tar out of me. Where to begin? Before we stepped into this year, we already lived in a weird age—the social media age, the outrage age, the cancel-culture age, and the entrenched politicization age. And right in the middle of all that, the duel pandemics of COVID-19 and fear swept through our world. If that weren’t enough, recently, we all collectively watched a man named George Floyd denied the dignity of being treated like a human as his life was slowly snuffed out of him, and in response to that—and so much more—many of our cities were (literally) lit on fire.

And there you are, Christian. A citizen of heaven living as a sojourner on earth, wrestling with your allegiances. Like the rest of us, you are trying to get a handle on how to think about all this, and like many of us, you’re trying (in vain) to work it out on social media. Everything there has the appearance of all-importance, and everything there demands your contribution. So you try to figure it all out and educate yourself on the issues. Except you find that, given the vitriolic, contentious and politicized nature of the platform, every passionate “expert” shouting from one direction is met with another passionate “expert” shouting from another. And your temptation is to either allow paralysis to set in, or throw yourself wholesale into one side.

The reality is, you may feel very strongly about all of these issues, and you most likely have church members who feel the opposite. As a pastor, I can tell you that the full spectrum of political opinions is well-represented in my congregation. In November, we will have members voting Blue, members voting Red, members abstaining, and members writing in their own ballots, all looking at one another and thinking, “How could you possibly vote that way?” What I know for a fact is that while my entire church decries racism as an evil in the sight of God, and not one of our members denies that the gospel of Jesus Christ has profound implications for how we view racism and racial tensions in our country, our membership is nevertheless vastly diverse in its opinions on how exactly those implications manifest themselves socially.

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