The Idolatry of Fellowship

Lenten Learning 3: Sometimes I think I go to church more to see other people than to worship God.

I don't really have anything deep or pithy to say about it. It's just that, over Lent, I realized that I do this a lot. To the extent that I can't tell where one ends and the other begins

And because I can't always tell the difference between worship and fellowship, I feel like I'm doing something wrong. Like I'm putting being with them before God; that I don't believe He's enough. I don't know what to do about it. Part of me thinks I need to walk away from my church until I can guarantee that my focus and priorities are straight.

But when I look for advice, I don't always find the derision I expected:

"I vividly remember how I had, at one time, become totally dependent on the affection and friendship of one person. This dependency threw me into a pit of great anguish and brought me to the verge of a very self-destructive depression. But from the moment I was helped to experience my interpersonal addiction as an expression of a need for total surrender to a living God who would fulfil the deepest desires of my heart, I started to live my dependency in a radically new way. Instead of living it in shame and embarrassment, I was able to live it as an urgent invitation to claim God's unconditional love for myself, a love I can depend on without any fear." -- Henri Nouwen

"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 wouldn't go to the churches and Gospel Halls;.... 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 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." -- C. S. Lewis

"Some Christians try to go to heaven alone, in solitude. But believers are not compared to bears or lions or other animals that wander alone. Those who belong to Christ are sheep in this respect, that they love to get together. Sheep go in flocks, and so do God's people". -- Charles Spurgeon

The best I can do is try to be honest about it, with myself and with God, until I decide how to handle it.