Editorial October 9, 1971 Issue

Go to Church? Why Should I?

Naomi Price

A church is a solid stone building with a steeple, stained-glass windows, and fixed wooden pews for the congregation to sit on. Or is it?

Fifty years ago most people in the Western world may have pictured a church this way. But not now. Developing concepts of God, and of the purpose of religious worship, have brought changes. The stereotype of an orthodox church as a massive edifice, with a full-time ordained minister in charge, is increasingly being replaced by a more modest image of a building in which everything is conveniently flexible. Nowadays lay members or moonlighting clergy are frequently conducting services in an informal atmosphere with the congregations sitting where they like. Sometimes guitars, instead of the traditional organ, provide music, and discussions are substitutions for sermons.

Is this a new development in religious observance? Or is it a reversion to the practice of the early Christians, who looked on church as people and the place to worship as a location wherever people could conveniently be together to pray? Christ Jesus said, "Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them." Matt. 18:20; He left neither specific direction for ritualistic religious observance nor blueprints for church buildings.

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