Do I really have to go to church, or can I follow Jesus on my own? Going to church does not save you. Salvation is by grace through faith in Christ, not by an attendance record. But a solo faith is not the faith the Bible describes. Scripture calls God’s people a family, and you belong to a family. It shapes you whether the week was easy or hard.
Start with a detail most readers pass over. Almost none of the New Testament was written to an individual believer reading alone. Paul writes to churches in Rome, Corinth and Galatia. Hebrews is addressed to a community. Even the short letter to Philemon is sent “to the church in thy house” (Philemon 1:2). The Bible’s teaching on following Jesus arrived, almost entirely, as mail opened in a room full of people.
Dr. Carmen Imes, who teaches Old Testament, builds her case on that wider biblical picture. “I would argue that the Christian life was never meant to be a solo enterprise,” she says. She does not claim that a person alone can do nothing. Her claim is more precise: “We can like dabble in following Jesus, but to fully follow Jesus involves becoming a family with other believers and doing life together.” To see why she draws the line between dabbling and following, we have to read the texts that call believers a family.
Where does the family picture begin?
It begins long before the church. Imes opens her account of God’s people with Abraham and Sarah, because this is where God calls one family to become a nation that will bless the nations. The promise in Genesis 12:3 ends with these words: “and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.” God has families in view, and through one family, all of them.
Genesis does not pretend this household was healthy. As Imes points out, Abraham twice passed his wife off to protect himself and profited from it, and Abraham and Sarah mistreated their Egyptian servant Hagar. The text records those failures plainly. That candor matters for our question. The Bible’s first family of faith was never a group of people who had earned each other’s approval, and nothing in Scripture suggests God chose it because it was pleasant to be around.
What did “brother” and “sister” mean when Jesus and Paul said it?
When Jesus’ relatives came looking for him, he pointed to the people seated around him and redefined his family. “For whosoever shall do the will of God, the same is my brother, and my sister, and mother” (Mark 3:35). This is narrative, so it describes a moment rather than issuing a rule. Still, the redefinition it describes runs through the rest of the New Testament. Paul calls believers brethren constantly. He introduces a woman to the Roman church as “Phebe our sister” (Romans 16:1).
Modern readers tend to hear sibling language as soft and sentimental. Imes argues that first-century hearers would have heard it as binding. She says that “in the first century, the sibling relationship was the most important one,” a bond that demanded deeper loyalty than marriage did. Her illustration: if a woman’s husband and her brother asked for two things that could not both be done, the expected choice in that world was the brother. That is her historical claim about ancient family life, and readers can weigh it as hers. If it holds, the implication is striking. When Jesus and Paul call believers siblings, they are reaching for the most demanding relational word they had.
Imes is careful about what follows. She does not think the New Testament is telling modern households to rearrange their marriages. What she draws from it is narrower and harder: the people beside you in the pew are to be like siblings, which means “we need to reorganize our values and priorities around their flourishing.” Paul’s own instruction points the same way: “Be kindly affectioned one to another with brotherly love; in honour preferring one another” (Romans 12:10). Preferring someone in honour means ranking their good ahead of your own, and that is something you choose to do before any feeling arrives.
Then comes the line that answers the solo-faith question most directly. “You don’t get to choose your siblings,” Imes says. “You’re just born into a family and you’re kind of stuck with your brother or your sister.” The church works the same way in her account: “And in a similar way, we are stuck with each other in the church, and we need to learn how to work through those differences and come out on the other side.” A person who follows Jesus alone has not escaped this family. They have only stopped showing up to it.
Why does Romans end with a list of names?
Romans 16 is easy to skip. It reads like a roll call: Phebe, Priscilla and Aquila, and dozens of other names. The instruction at its center is simple: “Salute one another with an holy kiss” (Romans 16:16).
Imes treats the chapter as the letter’s doctrine put into practice. The mix of names, men and women, Jewish and Gentile, Greek and Roman, is the point. Paul is handing them an assignment to greet one another on his behalf. “It’s a group project to go out and say hello to each other,” she says.
Many readers treat the chapter as the ordinary closing of an ancient letter, so the claim needs support from the letter itself. Romans supplies it one chapter earlier. After pages on Jew and Gentile alike being justified by faith, Paul turns that argument into a command: “Wherefore receive ye one another, as Christ also received us to the glory of God” (Romans 15:7). The word “wherefore” ties the welcome to everything before it. Read that way, the greetings of chapter 16 are the command of 15:7 carried out by name. Whether the list is the key to the whole letter is a judgment about emphasis. That the gospel of Romans is meant to produce a household of very different people is plain in the text.
Paul makes the same point in Galatians 3:28: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” He does not erase those differences. He denies that any of them decides who belongs. Imes describes the early church as gathering “rich and poor, slave and free” around one table. A private faith never has to test that claim, because it never has to sit next to anyone.
What does Hebrews actually command?
The verse most often quoted on this question is Hebrews 10:25, and its context changes how it reads. Hebrews is written to believers under pressure, some of them tempted to give up on the faith entirely. The two verses run together: “And let us consider one another to provoke unto love and to good works: Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is; but exhorting one another: and so much the more, as ye see the day approaching” (Hebrews 10:24-25).
Three observations matter. First, this is a command, not a description, so it binds in a way a narrative example would not. Second, the phrase “as the manner of some is” shows that people were already drifting away from the gathering. The writer is addressing a real habit of absence. Third, the reason given for gathering is relational. Believers meet so they can consider one another, stir each other toward love, and exhort one another. That work requires being in the room.
What the verse does not specify is just as important. It says nothing about a particular day, a building, an hour or a style of service. Christians organize their gatherings in many faithful ways. The text binds believers to the assembly, and it leaves the format to them.
Doesn’t my own household come first?
This is the strongest objection sincere believers raise. In a culture that treats marriage as the highest relationship, many people with a spouse and children feel they have no capacity left for anyone else, and they quietly excuse themselves from church community. Imes answers bluntly that this reading misses the New Testament, “because the New Testament actually says that your church family is supposed to be your priority.”
That answer needs to be read alongside the rest of Scripture, not in place of it. Paul is just as blunt in the other direction: “But if any provide not for his own, and specially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel” (1 Timothy 5:8). Caring for your own household is a real obligation, and the church does not override it. So the question is not which family wins. Imes herself says the New Testament is not asking modern families to reorganize their homes. Her point is that the church family cannot be the thing that is always cut. The household is meant to be held inside the larger family, not walled off from it.
She widens the lens further. “Marriage is a good thing, but it’s not the highest good, the highest good is us becoming a family as a church,” she argues. If the church believes that, single people are not waiting in the hallway for real adulthood to begin. They belong fully to the household now. Jesus himself was single. A church that treats marriage as the finish line has quietly shrunk the family Scripture describes.
The biblical image of the church as the bride of Christ points the same direction. Jesus has one bride, Imes observes, not many. If the church is that bride, believers cannot each keep a separate arrangement with him. “It’s not just about me and Jesus, it’s about us and Jesus,” she says.
What if my schedule, or my screen, is the real issue?
For many readers the obstacle is exhaustion. Imes answers with a test drawn from Sabbath. A student once told her that taking an extra class would mean giving up her weekly rest. Imes told her the decision was easy, because God had commanded rest and would not be calling her to abandon it. She applies the same logic to church: “if your schedule does not allow you to meet with other believers because you’re over capacity, then there is something you’ve said yes to, something you’ve put in your life that God was not asking you to do.”
The test moves attention from the church to the calendar. It also makes room for real exceptions. Some people, such as nurses, are called to jobs that require working on Sunday morning. Imes’s counsel to them is to attach to a church anyway and find ways to be involved with those believers during the week, which fits a command about the gathering rather than about the hour.
Online church raises a related question. The pandemic forced churches everywhere to ask what was essential and what was missing when they met only through a screen. Imes’s verdict is that a purely streamed faith is disembodied and disconnected. “I don’t think we realize what a difference it makes to show up,” she says, to make eye contact and walk alongside people in their weekly struggles. Scripture does not settle how Christians should use technology in worship, and faithful believers use it differently. But the family picture explains the limit. A screen can carry a sermon. It cannot let you notice who is missing.
She tells of a man in her congregation who had brain surgery on a Tuesday and walked forward to receive communion the following Sunday. Nobody would have blinked if he had stayed home. He came because he wanted to be with his people and worship his Lord. Her conclusion is pointed: “if you can show up the week you had brain surgery, anybody could show up.”
What a family does that a service cannot
Underneath the attendance question sits a quieter assumption. Imes names it: “so many Christians treat church as yet another tool in their self-actualization toolkit.” Church becomes one more item on the week’s list, there to make me a better me. Against that, she insists that “God didn’t design us to be autonomous.” The tensions of shared life are where the rough edges of character get sanded down. Reconciliation works like a muscle, and it does not grow in relationships we kept only because they paid off for us. It grows with people we did not pick and cannot replace.
None of this means staying anywhere at any cost. Imes is clear that there are good reasons to leave a particular church, including abuse that goes unaddressed, controlling leadership, or a congregation that no longer treats the Bible as its authority. Leaving an unhealthy room is different from leaving the family. The biblical picture sends people toward a community where they can receive support and give it.
That is why the question “Do I have to go?” is slightly off target. It treats church as a service you might skip. The texts ask something else. If these people really are your brothers and sisters, who is missing you this week, and whom are you missing?