Why Do I Even Go to Church?

“Why do I even go to church?”

I immediately felt a pang of guilt, even as it passed through my mind.

I knew that ‘not going’ couldn’t be the answer, but this was the raw state of emotional exhaustion that I had reached.

A lifetime of church-related trauma was catching up to me, and lately, the triggers were everywhere. I found myself in a state of constant hypervigilance, wrestling with deeply embedded fears, and going home only to spend days battling profound torture in my mind over the most ordinary interactions.

Why do I do this to myself?

I was weary and so very close to giving up.

“Not going” had never once, in all my existence, crossed my mind as an option before.

But suddenly… it was.

For the first time in my life, I realized that going to church was an option.

After decades of living in a high-control church world, where personal agency was obliterated, the concept of choosing was something I was still discovering and exploring bit by bit.  

On this particular day, as the question floated through my mind, it suddenly dawned on me that no one was “making” me go anymore.

No one was leaning over a pulpit breathing soul-shattering rebukes. No one was crushing me with threats of divine wrath or eternal damnation.  No one was dangling reputational or social sabotage over my head. No one was manipulating or guilting or pressuring me.

The only reason I had arrived at this question was because, for several months, I had been stuck at home due to health issues, generally unable to attend church, and during that span of time, I noticed something.

I had not been battling the customary dizzying swirl of anxiety, or the agonizing overthinking that went on for days after being at church.

I was experiencing peace in my mind, and it was a phenomenal reprieve.

The implication was somewhat alarming to me.

Was church harming me?

The thought made me uncomfortable, but I reflected on it.

The pattern had become painfully predictable.

The instant our tires touched the church driveway, fight-or-flight was activated. To keep myself from slipping into an internal panic, I anchored myself in certain predictabilities, but if something was off or different than usual, rooms would begin to swirl and I would panic.

From there, it became very easy to slip into a place where the people around me were no longer the new friends and brothers and sisters in Christ who had done me no harm. They were people who could yell at me, humiliate me, or destroy my life. Leaders who could rebuke me publicly or call me into an office and rip me to shreds.  They were individuals that could be scrutinizing me, whose opinions could carry weight that might harm me in some way. I lived in mortal fear that someone would think I was a problem or a troublemaker or a danger to extinguish.

There were times that this noise in my head became more than I could bear and I’d slip out to our car and rupture into sobs of pent-up agony.

I was tired.

Tired of spiraling.

Tired of the torture in my mind.

But during this lengthy period of physical ailment, surgery, and then recovery, while I had been unable to attend church, there had been no such spirals.

I wonder now whether this whole situation with my health—and being sidelined in the manner that I was—was God’s providential way of teaching me something I desperately needed to learn, because what followed began to reshape my thinking entirely.

Deeply disturbed, I prayed and put my dilemma before God. I asked Him to help me, and He graciously did just that.

Earlier that year, I started a study of the Psalms because a black cloud of despair had been clawing mercilessly at the doors of my mind. I found them to be a powerful antidote against this because they are filled to the brim with the characteristics and attributes of God. It had become a powerful reminder of Who He is, and Who I serve. After reading, I’d listen to a playlist of Psalms-inspired songs by Poor Bishop Hooper while I cleaned, which I found to be an effective way of meditating on the truths God was teaching me through His Word. In this manner, I often found my eyes being directed away from my problems and steadfastly fixed on my heavenly Father, who reigns over all things pertaining to me.

Not long after I started this, a handful of Christian books dealing with anxiety, shame, and the fear of man found their way into my hands: Consider the Lilies by Jonny Ardavanis, Shame Interrupted and When People are Big and God is Small by Ed Welch. As I worked through these, they gradually helped me think more carefully about where and how anxiety could become sinful and led me to recognize a hard truth. Much of the fear and dread I experienced at church—the fear that caused me to spiral in anxiety week after week—was rooted in something I had not recognized before.

I feared people.

More specifically, I feared rejection.

I would come to church faithfully, but I’d leave tortured over someone’s expression—or lack of one—or the brevity of an interaction, or something they said or didn’t say. I could obsess all week about whether I had done something wrong, analyzing and reanalyzing word choices and conversations.

I felt suspended in this ambiguous state of having no idea if I was secure or not.

I think, subconsciously, I was scanning all the time, for hints from anyone that I was ok. That I was safe. That I wasn’t a leprous castaway to be purged forthwith.

Somewhere along the way my fear of people had become so large that it was eclipsing my thoughts of God.

But that was it.

In His gentle, gracious way, God let me see that in all my fretting and obsessing and spiraling…

that I had stumbled into an unhealthy preoccupation with the perceptions and thoughts of everyone but His.

Scripture calls this “fear of man” (Proverbs 29:25), and every time I succumbed to it, I was laying a snare for myself. I was allowing the dread of what others might conclude about me—and what their conclusions might cost me—to carry more weight in my heart than my confidence in God.

It was a brutal revelation.

Ashamed and deeply humbled, I put what I recognized before the Lord and repented.

I asked Him to set my heart aright and align me with His Word and His purposes.

This caused me to ask a slight variation of my original question:

Why does God want His people to go to church?

Through Scripture, (Hebrews 10:24–25; 1 Corinthians 14:26; 1 Peter 4:10–11) I began to see with fresh clarity that Christians gather to worship God, and to edify and serve one another.

That realization completely reoriented me.

The question was no longer:

Will I be rejected here? Will someone hurt me? Will I be safe with these people?

The question became:

How can I arrive prepared to worship God? How can I encourage the people He places around me? How can I serve Him?

Once again, my eyes were fixed upon God.

I began going to church with the deliberate intention of worshiping Him. Instead of entering the building preoccupied with myself and scanning the room for signs of danger, approval, acceptance, or rejection, I began preparing my heart to worship.

And as I sought ways to encourage others, I realized that the best way to do that was not to continually focus on ourselves or what we assume we need, but to point one another toward God. To talk about Him. To lift Him up. To raise one another’s eyes toward Who He is.

I began looking around for ways I could serve and pour into others.

As I became less consumed with my own fears and more intentional about loving and serving the people God had placed nearest to me, things began to change. After months of feeling as though I was trapped on a hamster wheel, it suddenly felt as if I was moving forward. Every relationship featured a deeper sense of peace, purpose, and unity.

I began making time for people, getting to know them better, and I marveled to see different relationships blossom.

I began to notice that even ordinary conversations often opened up natural opportunities to speak of His character—to remind one another of His sovereignty, His faithfulness, or His tender fatherly goodness.

Again and again, the lesson was the same:

Eyes off self.

Eyes fixed on Christ.

I look back now to eight months or so ago—to the despairing, swirling state I suddenly found myself in, and that question rising in my mind:

Why do I even go to church?

And I think about how God, in all His gracious kindness, gently took me on a journey that would answer it.

Only God could take a place that had become tangled in fear and torment and teach me to enter it with peace.

It’s not that church has become perfectly predictable or that people have suddenly become incapable of misunderstanding me. It’s not that I have been extended a guarantee that I will never be hurt, or rejected, or misjudged.

But I no longer go to church to secure myself against those things.

I go to hear His Word, to be an encouragement to others, and to love and serve those He places around me in whatever small ways He permits.

That was the answer I was looking for.

I go to church because I belong to Christ.

I go because my heart is compelled to worship Him and lift Him up.