A Prayer for Those Who Don’t Want to Go to Church

The church has become a painful or frustrating place for many people in recent years, for all sorts of reasons.

It’s painful for young people who don’t get why church leaders fail to fully embody the life of Jesus—why church leaders say such foolish, or arrogant, or reckless things in public or why they remain silent on things that contradict the very heart of the gospel.

It’s painful for elderly people who feel like there isn’t a place for them in their congregations, that they’re too old, too slow, too useless; that it’s too hard to start over making friends when most of their friends have either died or transitioned into an assisted living home.

It’s painful for long-standing members of Christ’s Body who find the church to be a fundamentally unfriendly place.

People are friendly on the surface, yes. People nod to each other across the aisle, sure. People say hi and they shake hands and they say, “How you doing?” But people are busy, facaded, self-protective and constitutionally rushed.

It’s painful for newcomers to the church who find the singing to be half-hearted, the order of worship to be an assembly line of activities that’s performed in the most *efficient* way possible, the prayers to be perfunctory, and the sermons to be tone-deaf to the real needs of the church.

It’s painful for single people who feel like they don’t belong anywhere meaningfully in their churches and for married with children who feel like a perpetually needy or a burden to the community.

It’s painful for pastors who feel like they’re letting everybody down at some point, that they can never measure up to their own expectations, and that the chaos of the world is too much to bear (alone, at least).

To be fair, the church is a source of profound joy and deeply meaningful participation for many others. That should also be said. And we positively thank God for such healthy churches.

But for those who struggle with going to church Sunday after Sunday, they too need compassion. They too need a sympathetic hearing. They too need a prayer.

This prayer is for them—to the God who hears the cry of the needy, whose mercies are new every morning and whose pleasure is to knit all into his one, holy, catholic and apostolic family.