In Drew Dyck’s book, Just Show Up: How Small Acts of Faithfulness Change Everything (A Guide for Exhausted Christians), he writes that isolation is a liar. So true! We read in Proverbs that you can’t make good, godly, and sound decisions about life when you isolate yourself (see Proverbs 18:1). As relational and communal beings, we need one another! We need one another in order to help us walk faithfully after Jesus. I have said this many times: Jesus calls you into a personal relationship, but never a relationship that’s meant to be private.

Drew, quoting pastor Dave Gipson writes, “Anyone can worship alone in the woods. But you really have to love God to put up with the broken, wandering people who show up to worship with you on a Sunday.” Christians are called to be engaged in the life of their church. We read this over and over in the (see Hebrews 10:24-25; Romans 12:4-5; 1 Corinthians 12:12-14; Ephesians 2:19-22; Colossians 3:16). Nothing revelatory there. But what I found interesting and compelling is that church attendance is clearly one indicator of spiritual health (among many), but it also benefits your physical and psychological health. He writes that church attendance significantly decreases the likelihood of depression, substance abuse, and sexual promiscuity.

Think about that statement. Faithful attendance at a church is one way (among many) that you can fight for mental clarity, experience progress, and perhaps even experience victory over depression, addiction to drugs and alcohol, and sexual immorality! What a word! Further, church engagement is “a mystical undertaking whereby we trade the comforts and convenience of individualism for membership in a spiritual collective that stretches back into 2k years of history.”

So in response, let’s reject the lie of isolation and lean in with our church family and let them lean in with us. Your physical health and spiritual health are contingent upon it.