Helen Mildenhall’s thought-provoking July 5 Viewpoints article about why she no longer goes to church calls for serious reflection as she tells of her struggles with God, Jesus, and the church—matters of ultimate importance in my view. The temptation is to either dismiss her concerns or rush to a defense of God without first pausing to think about what she is saying and taking her words not as a reason to argue, but a call to the church to realize that she speaks for many. We do well to listen carefully and go about our calling in our congregations with deepened awareness of how much is at stake. Here, after a bit of my own reflection, is an effort to shed light rather than heat on not only going to church but why I do.

First, God is no enemy of an honestly inquiring mind. A careful reading of the Bible shows that one needs only to think of Job, Jeremiah, the Book of Psalms, Thomas, or Peter—in fact virtually any prominent Biblical figure-–to realize that struggling with the ways of God is not presumptuous but part and parcel of a living faith. The congregation is the right place for inquiring minds to inquire, not in abstract debate but in response to Jesus’ command to love God with our mind as well as our hearts and souls and to love others as ourselves.

Next, and of foremost importance, the core event of the Christian faith—that God has won us back to himself through undeserved grace, freely and without our merit—contradicts our deepest instincts as those who live in a world where there is no free lunch. The good news of God is not about a lunch that’s free because it’s cheap; it’s about bread for the soul that is costly beyond imagining, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ for us.

That’s never obvious; it’s ever a stumbling block, as the New Testament makes clear. No wonder we struggle! As long as we live we must deal with a civil war going on within, which the Scriptures identify as our still-sinful self, battling our believing self. Faith, then, is not eliminating struggle but hanging on in trust that God’s grace will see us through.

Then, and this matters greatly, we are won from disillusionment to a recovery of faith by love, a Christ-given love that meets us in people who are humble rather than cocksure, steady rather than sporadic as doers of that love in practical deeds, day in and day out.

Sometimes there are the surprises of God’s love at work through those who make no claim to any faith whatsoever.

The church, as I know it and love it, is not the 100 percent club of those who have God all figured out, but instead is the food repository where one beggar helps another find the bread that lasts. It’s the hospital where those broken on the wheel of life find healing and hope and the gathering of the forgiven who are learning how to make forgiveness stronger than hate in the daily rounds. It’s the community of those who are glad to come together for Sabbath worship and fellowship, not because they are required to but because they get to.

These convictions are offered not to win points or suggest superiority over anyone, but rather in gratitude for being a part of God’s people at work in myriad ways that bring untold good to our communities for the past 50 years or so that I know something about. I offer them also because I am concerned about the subtle forces that chip away at faith in God and commitment to the church all over the western world, our part included.

All that notwithstanding, when faith becomes unambiguously transparent in works of love that show through in the congregations of our communities, then those who have opted out in disillusionment might find good reason to think again on what they are missing.

Rev. F. Dean Lueking is pastor emeritus at Grace Lutheran Church, River Forest.