I find it interesting that many church-goers assume that there is some form of Biblical mandate to get together every week. Jesus never said that.  The Bible doesn’t say that.

Gather together – yes.
And do lots of other things for/with one another.
But what’s with the “every Sunday until we die” mentality?

In part, this is due to the idea of Sabbath.  God has told us that we need to rest. We need to take time to refocus on God.  Agreed! Take a day. I even support taking the same day as those you are in intentional Jesus-following relationship with (i.e. local church).

Does God say we need to all get together and sing and hear a sermon on the sabbath? NO!. I suppose that in the good old days, it made sense.  “Hey, we’re all not working this day, let’s get together.” But the world has changed, work has changed, how the week is viewed has changed. We don’t all have Sunday free. And honestly, I think that for some, what has become of Sunday is not much like the Sabbath described in the Bible. Yes, I just said that. If you are going to use the Sabbath justification, I recommend you do a little study of what the Bible says about Sabbath.

Do I think we should get together with people to help one another be like Jesus? Yes.
Do I think things can happen when we are gathered that can’t happen when we are alone? Yes.
Do I think it is helpful to have set days and times to help us actually do this? Yes.

But I think what we do is too often a matter of “that’s what we do” than what works best, or what God is asking of us. I think we need to live out our spirituality together in a way that integrates all of life, and that can’t be done in just one day. It needs to happen EVERY day. I think most would agree. Yet we still cram our “church” into Sunday…

So maybe in order to do this, we have to get the idea of “we must all get together every week on the same day” out of our heads. It’s not Biblical.  It’s not particularly effective for our discipleship. Let’s figure out what is!