Do You Still Need Church to Go to Church?

Before you raise an eyebrow

There are three topics this blog has quietly stepped around since I published my first post in November 2019: politics, sports and religion.

Not because they don’t matter. Quite the opposite. They matter so much to people that a single sentence, written in good faith or bad, can start a fire nobody asked for. Everyone has an opinion, every opinion has a camp, and every camp has someone ready to be offended.

So for over 600 posts, I’ve kept the conversation on life itself: leadership, managing people, the quirks of human behaviour, and the odd ideas that don’t get enough airtime but shape how we live.

Today it may look like I’m breaking that rule. I’m not. This isn’t a post about doctrine, denominations or who is right. It is a post about change, and about how something many of us grew up inside has been quietly taken apart and reassembled in front of our eyes. Church just happens to be the clearest example I know.

The order of service

For many of us Gen Xers, church meant one of the Orthodox churches: Catholic, Anglican, Baptist, Methodist. Each had its own accent. The Catholics had their chants. The Anglicans and Baptists had their hymns. Even praise had a dress code.

In the Catholic church of my childhood, you barely clapped. You swayed, gently, left to right, as though the music might break if you moved too fast. The Anglicans didn’t really start clapping until years later, perhaps decades. Every church had its own way of getting to the same place.

But pick up the order of service, that little sheet they handed you at the door, and the skeleton was the same everywhere. Processional hymn. Call to worship. Bible reading. Prayers. Sermon. Thanksgiving. Holy Communion, where there was one. Recessional. You knew where you were at any moment, and you knew what came next.

There was a system to it, and the system served us. I won’t pretend that generation was made of saints. It wasn’t. But the teaching was consistent from one pulpit to the next, and so the line between right and wrong was drawn in thick ink. There were very few greys.

Then somebody turned up the volume

Those lines began to blur when the Pentecostal churches arrived in force. What they did, in my view, was not to invent a new process but to refine the old one and plug it into a bigger amplifier.

Prayers that used to live in hushed tones, or entirely in the mind, were now said out loud. You could hear the person beside you. You could hear what they were asking for, what was keeping them up at night, what they were desperate for God to fix. People cried openly. People shouted. Worship stopped being something you did politely and became something you did with your whole body.

It was a different vibe altogether, and many young people from the Orthodox churches caught it and moved. Yet look closely and much of what they found was borrowed. The hymns were still there, sung with more drums. The readings were still there, preached with more fire. The energy was new. The foundation was the same one laid by the Orthodox churches, which had themselves grown out of older traditions of worship.

The year the doors closed

I won’t dig into every reason the church has changed over the years. That road leads straight into the controversy I promised to avoid. But if I had to name one moment when the evolution took a sharp turn, it would be COVID.

Almost overnight, people discovered that church could come to them. You could worship from your sitting room. You could pay your tithe with a bank transfer instead of a walk to the altar. You could receive prayer without anyone laying a hand on your head.

Whatever you think of that, it was a change, and it stuck. I suspect many churches felt a dip in attendance during that season, and some may still be feeling it. Those who did return, especially the young, often came back for more than the service itself. They came for community. They came to belong to something that was moving.

The order of service, taken apart

Here is the part that fascinates me. Remember that order of service: prayer, worship, reading, sermon, all in one building, in one sequence, on one morning? Its pieces have now broken off and become movements of their own. You no longer need to be in a church for all of it.

Prayer never closes now. Online prayer groups run 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You log in when it suits you, the prayer points are spelt out, the scriptures are listed, and you join in. Later, you log in again. There are physical prayer gatherings too, weekly or every other month, where people simply come to pray and nothing else.

Worship has become its own event. Gospel musicians host concert-style gatherings where the whole agenda is praise. Anyone who identifies with the faith can walk in from anywhere, lift their hands, and walk out. No announcements. No offering talk. Just worship.

The sermon is now on demand. You choose the preacher you admire, at the hour you prefer, on the device in your hand. Next week, you may choose someone else.

In other words, the church has been unbundled, the same way the album became the playlist and the newspaper became the news feed. The components still exist. They just no longer come in one box, and people now decide which pieces to pick up, when, and how often.

The components still exist. They just no longer come in one box.

A faith for the nomads

None of this means the old churches are on their way out. The Orthodox churches will remain. The Pentecostal churches will remain. Each will keep serving the people it was built for, and many will find great comfort in the full, familiar sequence.

But there is a generation that does not sit still. Gen Z, Gen Alpha and a good slice of millennials are nomadic and flexible. They are restless with anything that asks them to sit for hours on someone else’s schedule. They curate everything else in their lives, so it is no surprise that they want to curate how they pray, how they praise, and whom they listen to.

For them, the unbundled model isn’t a watering down. It is access. It lets them engage with their faith on their own terms, in the pieces that speak to them, at the moments they need them most.

So, what comes next?

I said at the start that this wasn’t really a post about religion, and I meant it. It’s a post about how the things we once thought were fixed can quietly come apart and find new shapes, from the swaying pews of my childhood to the 3 a.m. prayer link on someone’s phone.

Where does it go from here? Your guess is as good as mine. So I’ll leave you with the question in the title, and I’d love to hear your answer: do you still need church to go to church?