Why Mariella Frostrup is quite right about church

In this morning's Guardian 'problem page' Mariella Frostrup is asked by her correspondent if going to church might be the solution to the "sick feminist joke that my life is"? The real surprise of the article is that her reply is that, yes, church could be the answer.


Granted that the article is heavily caveated ( I'm more naturally tilted towards Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens's atheism") and laden with irony ("desperate times call for desperate measures"), Frostrup is clearly genuine when she says that "embracing religion is one of the few guaranteed ways of joining a real-life community, carving out a blame-free 90 minutes a week for yourself against the backdrop of Mass, and experiencing a cathartic blast of exuberance during hymn singing."


Frostrup thinks that it would be truly desperate to contemplate embracing a religion you don't believe in to get some respite from your daily life, but recognises that that is precisely how desperate some, perhaps millions of, women in our culture are.


I wouldn't want to claim that churches are the only place where you can guarantee to be part of a real-life community. But my experience is that they are one of the few places where regular attenders are massively keen to welcome newcomers, not just because of a missionary zeal to see more people come to know Jesus Christ personally (though I hope we have that) but because the Christian gospel teaches us to be interested in people, precious bearers of God's image, for their own sake. 


Interestingly lots of the comments on the piece seem to think that going to church when you don't believe is a sort of hypocrisy. If that view is at all representative (and I suspect it is) then Christians need to work hard to correct it and show that anybody who attends a church is most welcome to join in all sorts of aspects of our community even though they might not, in Christ, be part of the church family.

The reality is that people start to come to church for all sorts of reasons - sudden change in belief, interest in spiritual aspects of life, a way to meet new people or simply an escape from the pressures of life. No Christian minds anybody coming to church for any of those reasons - because no Christian pretends that going to church is what makes you a Christian, important though it is.

It would be a disaster, however, is people in these situations who do come to our churches, were able to get involved without coming to realise through our explanation of the gospel that the root cause of many of the stresses and strains of the post-feminist life are curable in the end not by a loving community (though it may help you cope) but by a radical shift in belief and a rejection of the values that lead so many women to be slaves to a hopeless ideal of homemaker-businesswoman-mother-goddess, 

We need to challenge the consumerism that says we all need more stuff obtained by more work. We need to challenge the right-culture, which means that when members of our family fail us we become embittered, resentful and self-righteous.

Most of all though we need to make sure that our church meetings are about worship. The fact that a church service is primarily about God (and, as a result about loving others) not me, unlike a Zumba class or a book group say, is a wonderful antidote to the self-obsession that infects our entire culture.

Only as we point stressed out, frazzled, overworked, overconsuming, rights obsessed modern people to the reality of our identity as finite creatures accountable to a great King who offers his eternal covenant love in Christ can we really offer them the hope of real rest.