This may sound terribly self-serving, but I do not intend it to be so.  I genuinely believe this advice to be true.  The best support that a person can have in their faith-life is regular and committed active participation in a conventional and sacramental local Church community.  Let me break that statement down for you.

Many people say that they can worship God in the privacy of their own homes or in the private places of their minds.  I suppose that is possible, but it is not practical.  Hundreds of years ago, people escaped the early church gatherings because they were disgusted with the people that they found in their worship communities.  Those people became what we called Hermits.  Many of them were extraordinarily dedicated to the service of God and many of them lived exemplary lives of dedication in solitude.  While their devotion was amazing, their faith grew in a distorted way and they wound up loving God, but hating people.  And that directly contradicts the two commands given us by our Savior: To love God and to love our neighbor.  Practically speaking, we cannot exercise a healthy Christian Faith apart from regular participation in a community of believers.

Quite often, the people who want to practice their faith apart from the community of the faithful end up not growing in their faith and actually declining in their practice.  We have found this true in virtually every walk of human life.  We simply Must be accountable to others because we will not be accountable to ourselves.  It is too much our human inclination to make excuses for ourselves so that we often lose our self-direction, and thus our way.

I say that our participation must be in a conventional church not because there is something wrong with innovation and novelty, but because innovation in the Church has its own hazards.  When we in the Church try to do novel things in order to emphasize some important corner of the faith, it always comes at the expense of some other corner of the faith.  That is precisely how so many sects throughout history have gone astray and descended into heresy.  It is not so much that they have gone all wrong, but rather that they have lost their balance.  As in the case of the Hermits, who so loved God that they began to hate their fellow man whom “God so loved that He gave his only begotten son”.  It is so easy to lose sight of the other important things if we concentrate too much on one piece of the puzzle.  The conventional churches have learned how to live a balanced life: loving God, loving our neighbor, cherishing the word and valuing the sacraments, engaging in prayer and in service, living the Christian Calendar so that we balance joy with repentance and match historic faith with Spirit-filled renewal.

Finally, I added the idea of Committed participation because of the wisdom of Saint Benedict.  He saw that when he gathered the local hermits together in a community, all too often, there would be a clash of ideas and practices such that many would leave the community rather than try to adjust and fit in.  Human pride is, and has always been, the beginning of sin.  Joining in and committing to remain in a community requires each member to consider that their own opinion might not be the best way.  It requires each of us to consider that the majority opinion might actually be wrong.  It means that each of us has to calm down and work within the structure of our community to make things better one step at a time. All too often, new communities and new congregations spring up because of human pride and arrogance.  Whereas if we commit to remain permanently in a flawed and imperfect human community we will have to learn the most important things in life; humility, reconciliation, persuasion, tolerance, and generosity.  Those are the things that strengthen our faith and our faith communities.

I will close with a profound bit of advice from St. Paul’s letter to the Philippians: Phil 4:8-9  Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.  What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me—practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you. ESV  These are the things that life spent in a worshipping community can teach each of us.