The Problem With Church-Hopping
What would happen if you planted a rose bush and then kept digging it up and replanting it in different places? Eventually, the plant would die. By being constantly uprooted and replanted it has no opportunity to take root and grow. It will not gain the root depth required for stability, the nutrients from the soil for health, nor the maturity required to blossom.
So it is with Christians who “church-hop”. I know many who attend several churches at once, visiting one each weekend in rotation.
The problem with this practice is that with all the jumping around, these church-hoppers are not becoming rooted. They’re not allowing themselves the opportunity to become a full-fledged participating and thriving member of a church family. They’re always visitors and never members.
Why do people church hop? Maybe they’re afraid of commitment or that they’ll be asked to tithe or volunteer somewhere. Maybe they’re just trying to find a place they like. Maybe they like the variety of preaching styles or that it’s better to get a variety of viewpoints and not stagnate under one pastor.
Their problem, I think, is none of these. Their problem lies in their misconception of what church is. It’s not necessarily a fear of commitment. Generally, they regard church attendance in the same way as getting their kids to a ballgame, or going to the grocery store, or going to a parent-teacher meeting. They see it as an event: something else to fit into their lives because it’s the right thing to do.
What is church? It’s the body of Christ. It’s not an institution. It’s not an event on your calendar. It’s a living, breathing group of people who gather together in Jesus’ name to enjoy Him and each other and do the work of the Kingdom of God together. Church is a family reunion. It’s a party. It’s fun and goofy and serious and challenging and sobering. Like any family, it has its dysfunctions, but it offers has love, acceptance, forgiveness and grace.
Stop church-hopping and land somewhere. Stop making church all about you and your wants and instead make it about Jesus and where He wants you to be. Allow the Holy Spirit to put you in the body where He wants you. It will be a sure fit. Submit to His lead, participate, tithe and get involved. Plant yourself, take root, grow and bear fruit.
But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. 1 Corinthians 12:18 ESV
I’m a bit confused. By church-hopping you mean sunday service hopping? Why should one not go to different services to hear different pastors and at the same time be rooted in this one congregation where one feels at home? Ist church only sunday service? Is it reduced to a sunday morning ritual?
I agree with your point to get into a community and be part of it, participate. But still I think, one does not need to reduce oneself to this community. If there is one thing you don’t like too much in your group (not because you consider it wrong but because it’s not your style), why not go to the church nearby where they do this thing (be it sunday service, prayer group…) the way you can fully appreciate it?
God bless
De Benny
Reluctantly I had my family leave one church because over a period of years my doctrine and that of this particular church diverged on an increasing number of issues. I disagreed with something in almost every sermon. Some of the differences were minor, but the number and frequency wore on me. A few basic differences were substantial and grating. Sunday became the emotional the nadir of my week, although my wife and I both had our ministries there. My eldest child was finally coming to an age at which she would need explanation why I disagreed with something in almost every sermon. So we switched churches for the sake of our children.
For some years now, we have been members at a church belonging to a different Protestant group, one with centuries of heritage in the new world and the old, one at which my doctrinal differences are relatively minor and few. But I look back with some sadness at leaving the old church, one in a denomination still of some merit, I think.
And I reflect with sadness that the doctrine of many denominations and individual churches has drifted so far in many ways from the older doctrines common to much of the Protestant Reformation. My daughter, away at college for the first time, finds it difficult to find an acceptable church. It may be the area, but so far as I understand, there are so many areas in which there are no churches of what I would consider to be an “undrifted” sort.
It is not that the church was ever perfect either. One must always live with compromise. Indeed one’s own spiritual blindness must be assumed part of the problem. The church is always under construction, never complete until the Day arrives.
As my father says, life is the art of the possible. Finding the best church available may be the best goal.
If “church hopping”–I had not heard the term in a while–is popular because of the dearth of good churches, I sympathize. But I agree that on the whole, church hopping is more of a sign of a problem with the hopper than of the targeted churches … unless, as in the case of my brother-in-law, because his job requires he be constantly traveling weekends.
But perhaps I had not heard the term “church hopping” in a while because the lack of commitment usually implied has yielded to hopping out of the church altogether, as it were. Eight in ten “churched” teenager in the US leaves the church entirely by his or her 20′s if I remember the statistic rightly. And another stat by Barna suggests that on various moral measures, the statistical differences once present between church and society has shrunk to the negligible.
Thus the church has hopped out of itself, so to speak. The statistics suggest in the aggregate that there is no longer a difference between the church and the “world” in the US. It is not that there are no Christians or believers or good churches, but only that finding a good church may be difficult.
And at present, church hopping may be a symptom of a larger disease.
But I must conclude with hope. For one thing, matters are not as bleak as during the exile of God’s people to Babylon. Look what followed some centuries later. And for another, Jesus said He would build His church. That He might fail is laughable, despite the bad news. I think it was Robert E. Lee who likened the growth of the church to the tide. Waves ebb and flow, rise and fall, but the tide slowly comes in. Our lives are so short that we may witness only the rise or fall of a single wave. It is history, Lee suggested, which teaches us to hope.