Don’t Be in the Two Percent

I was intrigued by the article on the front page of the Times-News a few years ago. It was about church attendance in North Carolina in general and Alamance County in particular. One thing that made me laugh out loud was the pie chart that measured church attendance in our state. Forty percent of us in the Tar Heel state report that we attend church weekly. Twenty-four percent say they go nearly weekly, or monthly. Maybe that means they go weakly. Thirty-four percent never or seldom go. None of those numbers provoked laughter, only a groan or a sigh. But then I saw the tiny sliver in the very top of the pie chart, representing two percent of the people in North Carolina who don’t know if they attended church or not. Now, that is funny.

There are a lot of things that I don’t know if I did last year. I don’t know if I rode a bicycle more than once. I don’t know if I skipped a rock across a pond. I probably did; I just don’t remember. I don’t know if I played golf three times or two. I don’t know if I stayed up past midnight even once. I don’t know if I played a card game. There are many more, but you get the drift. The things I am not sure I did are just not that important to me. But I know whether I went to a funeral, a wedding, or a church service. How can someone not know that? Clearly because going to church is not something that is important to them, not just to the two-percenters, but to the growing majority of people in our city and state.

You need a reason to go to church? “And He (God) put all things under His (Jesus’) feet and gave Him as head over all things to the church, which is His body, the fullness of Him who fills all in all.” The church is the sum and substance of God’s plan for the world. Jesus rules over kings and governments and scientific discoveries and technological breakthroughs and demonic powers and the powers of nature and universities and religions and the Milky Way and the galaxies that He has flung throughout the universe. He rules over everything that we do know about and He rules over everything we don’t know about. And the One who rules over everything we know about and everything we don’t yet know about is the head of the church.

Alistair Begg tells the story of John Reith, the first director of the BBC, the British Broadcasting Corporation. He was a tall man, six feet six, an intimidating figure who had big bushy eyebrows that he liked to peer through as he looked at you. But early in his tenure as director, he saw some of his employees huddled together, whispering about something. Later that day Reith called one of them to his office and asked what the group had been discussing. The young man said, “Oh, we were talking about how to produce a radio program that will be a fitting burial for the Christian faith. It’s time for that nonsense to be put to rest.” Standing up and towering over the young man, a red-faced John Reith looked through bushy eyebrows and growled, “The church will stand over the BBC’s grave one day!” And it will.

I want to invite the two-percenters to join us for worship. If for no other reason, at least you will know that you went to church in 2021.

See you Sunday.