No podcast, book club, or online community can replace the embodied gathering of believers. This has become clearer to me over the past several years.
The local church is inefficient by design. You don’t get to curate your fellow congregants. The person sitting next to you might bore you, frustrate you, or have politics you find distasteful. That’s the point. Christianity is practiced among people you didn’t choose.
The atomization of modern life—where we increasingly interact only with self-selected affinities—makes the church’s stubborn locality more important, not less. It’s one of the few remaining institutions that forces us to be present with particular people, in a particular place, at a particular time.
The “spiritual but not religious” framework misses this entirely. Spirituality without community, without obligation, without embodiment—it’s not Christianity. It’s a different thing wearing Christian vocabulary.