Part one of two, by Wes McAdams, Facebook posting, June 13, 2014
According to a study by the Hartford Institute of Religion Research and a new book
entitled, “Why Nobody Wants to Go to Church Anymore,” less than 20% of Americans attend
worship services every week. They say there are four main reasons why people don’t want to “go
to church.” Here they are …

1. They don’t want to be lectured.
2. They see the church as judgmental.
3. They see the church as hypocritical.
4. They see the church as irrelevant.
Certainly, not everyone in this study is a Christian in the New Testament sense, but
doesn’t this show you the real reason so many have stopped attending? The real reason is that
over the 2,000 years, the concept of “church” has become so diluted and twisted that people
don’t even know what it is anymore. The church is supposed to be the family or body of all
Christians.
For a Christian to say, “The church is judgmental, hypocritical, and irrelevant,” is for that
Christian to call himself judgmental, hypocritical, and irrelevant because he is the church. When
Christians don’t understand they are the church, and when they see the church as an
institution which they can either choose to support or not, they lose the entire concept of
Christianity. Jesus did not come to redeem individuals, but a people. One simply cannot be a
Christian outside of the body of Christ (Romans 12; 1 Corinthians 12). To be a Christian is to
be in the church.
When someone is in need and Christians say things like, “You should call the church and
they will help you,” it reveals that these Christians probably see the church as an institution
which exists separate from themselves. As a Christian, when you say, “The church should help
this person,” what you should be meaning is, “I (or we) should help this person.” The church is
not “they,” the church is “us.”
The second part of “Why Nobody Wants to Go to Church Anymore” will run next week.