Is Church Attendance Actually Causal? (A Follow-Up)

TL;DR
What if church attendance isn’t just correlated with better mental health, but actually causes it? Drawing on John 15, I suggest the mechanism is abiding—through worship, prayer, Scripture, and community, people receive God’s grace, which produces joy. The data may simply be measuring what Scripture has said all along.

What if church attendance is not correlation, but actually causation?

In a previous post (see below), I wrote about the confusing and confounding tendency of many, especially progressive Christians, to disregard the data showing regular church attendance as leading to better mental health. The data, as I’ve seen from Ryan Burge, seems pretty clear that it does—even if some have tried to discount it.

One of my readers, Stephanie Shareck Werner made an interesting comment:

“What can’t we ever just say that “church-goers actually are participating in something real”?”

I think there’s something to that.

And, if I may be frank, I think there are a lot of “we believe in science” progressives who simply don’t think this is real—even some progressive Christians, if I may be really frank. The assumption seems to be that there must be some other explanation.

But what if there isn’t?

Joy, Grace, and What We Receive

This Sunday in church, the pastor spoke on joy from Gospel of John 15. She made a few comments that stuck with me, reminding us that joy comes from God and is not something we need to manufacture or perform.

Looking at my Greek New Testament after the fact, I noted again that the word for joy is chara, and from doing a little digging that the Greek words—chairo (rejoice), chara (joy), and charis (grace)—all come from the same root.

In other words, joy and rejoicing are directly connected to grace—God’s grace.

Abiding as the Mechanism

Sunday evening, I was walking into church to pick up my daughter from youth group, and something hit me—what if it’s the abiding in Jesus, often practiced by being in church with the gathered community, that produces joy?

As in, we receive God’s grace, we receive God’s joy, when we are abiding in Christ.

Not just that church helps—but how: through repeated practices of abiding—worship, prayer, Scripture, community—that place people in a posture to receive grace.¹

In John 15:5, Jesus says, “I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit.” Then further down in 15:9, “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love.” Then in verse 11, “I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be complete.”

What’s fascinating is that in those few verses, the Greek word menó—translated as “abide” or “remain”—appears over and over again.

It seems then, pretty clear to me what Jesus is saying: abide or remain in me.

So Why the Resistance?

So I ask again: Why are so many progressives—especially progressive Christians—so eager to downplay or explain away the apparent benefits of church?

I can’t explain the former. But for the latter, I do increasingly wonder if, as suggested above, there’s no there, there, so to speak.

Or, to say it differently, data is discerning what we already know to be true based on the words of scripture.

Maybe the data isn’t surprising at all.
Maybe it’s simply measuring what happens when people remain in Christ.

1. A Necessary Qualification: Of course, as another reader I think noted, not all churches produces this. There are plenty of unhealthy expressions when sin and humanity get in the way. But that doesn’t negate the possibility that something real is happening.