Good morning MABC family and friends,
It case you missed it and weren’t paying attention, the Advent calendar says only two more days until Christmas! Tomorrow night is Christmas Eve and we will be worshipping together at 5:00 pm. We will sing together, pray together, share in the communion together and praise the Lord Jesus together. Hope you can make it! Don’t forget to check the card box in the foyer. As we close our first year together, I want to thank you for your faithfulness to attend worship services on Sundays. Now, I know that church attendance doesn’t make you any holier or get you into heaven, but it does show me a level of commitment to your faith. The Bible urges us not to forsake meeting together (Hebrews 10:25). Your faithful attendance attests to your desire for community which is one of the greatest benefits of being in a church body.
One of the great debates out there is whether or not being religious has any effect on mental health such as depression. I came across an interesting study being discussed on NPR’s Hidden Brain radio program. One of the thoughts being discussed was this idea that church attendance leads to better mental health. The hypothesis put forward was that it wasn’t church attendance itself that made a difference but family. Families considered more stable tend to be church going families. So is it the stable family and not church attendance? My thought was maybe the family is more stable because they are faithful church attenders! One of the researchers finally alluded to that and that was the conundrum. How do you sort that out?
One of the things they did then was to study students 13-18 years of age and their classmates. This took the family aspect out of it. Did they have friends who tended to be religious or more friends who were not? How did that effect the student’s mental health? The interview I read didn’t provide any of the details of the methodology or data but it did come up with one very important find:
When we look at the most depressed individuals, what we find
is that increasing religiosity by one standard deviation – which is
going from not going to church at all to attending church once a
week – decreases the probability of being at risk for moderate to
severe depression by as much as 20%.
Jane Fruehwirth, Economist, University of North Carolina.
God knew this years and years ago when he led the author of Hebrews to encourage the readers to gather together. If attending church once a week made a significant difference in the mental health of the students studied can you imagine what two times per week would do? Or maybe even three? I know that at one of those points the decrease would not be as great and it would level out but what is that number? P.S., as a former wellness instructor at the college level I know there are some studies that show that regular attenders are also healthier physically!
Thank you all for being regular attenders and a part of the MABC family. Continue to pray for and encourage one another as look to 2025!
Merry Christmas!
P.R.
