Why do we resist belonging?

I have grown used to it by now, but one belief I speak about often still draws a surprising amount of pushback: believers are called to belong, commit, and devote themselves to a local church.

What surprises me is not that new believers wrestle with this. It's that many who have been Christians for years — even decades — resist it. At times, even pastors and church leaders, both in the UK and beyond, push back strongly.

So the question is not whether this is biblical. The question is why we resist something so foundational and so clearly practised in Scripture.

In Acts 2:42, the first believers "devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching, to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and to prayer." Devotion was not optional. It was the normal response to salvation.

The New Testament never presents the Christian life as a solo journey. Believers are not only saved by Christ, but saved into His body. Paul's image is confronting: a hand that says, "I belong to the human race, therefore I don't need to be attached to a body," is not describing freedom. It is describing amputation.

The universal church gives us our identity in Christ. The local church is where that identity becomes lived, tested, and formed. God never designed believers to float. He designed them to be joined.

Perhaps the resistance we feel is not because the call to belong is unclear, but because it is costly. The question we must sit with is not, "Is this comfortable?" but, "Is this faithful?"