Can you leave church and still follow Jesus?

The short answer

Many people who have stepped away from church still pray and still love Jesus. The Gospels show him going to the synagogue, and they also show him meeting most of the people in his story out in ordinary places.

What the record says

Jesus went to the synagogue. Luke says he went “as was his custom” (Luke 4:16).

But many of his meetings happened far from any building. He sat down at a well in Samaria, tired from walking:

A woman of Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.”

John 4:7

He called a tax collector at his work:

As he passed by, he saw Levi the son of Alphaeus sitting at the tax office. He said to him, “Follow me.” And he arose and followed him.

Mark 2:14

He found Simon and Andrew on the shore, casting their nets into the lake (Mark 1:16 to 17).

At the well, the woman asked him which mountain was the right place to worship. He told her:

“Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither in this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father.

John 4:21

But the hour comes, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such to be his worshipers. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.”

John 4:23 to 24

How Son of Man tells it

Son of Man is a novel. It imagines the years the Gospels skip. In the novel he goes by Yeshua, the name his family would have called him. Yeshua grows up in the synagogue at Nazareth, and at fifteen he leads the Sabbath service there. Since he was five he has also climbed the ridge above the village to sit alone. In chapter fourteen, The Frequency, he climbs it at sundown and sits on the same stone he has used for fourteen years. He says one line of a psalm his father taught him, and he misses his father. He spends the night on his knees in the dust.

His chest was quiet. The quiet was wider than what had left it. It filled the space behind his ribs the way water fills a cistern.