Can Church Happen Alone on a Mountain?

I love the mountains.

I love hiking, trail running, mountain biking, skiing, backpacking. I feel a real deep sense of happiness out in the wilderness of the PNW. The mountains sing of God’s grandeur and the quiet of solitude is a comfort to my soul.

So I truly sympathize with the cultures throughout history who have built altars on high places and temples on mountain tops. The divine feels so much closer in those places. Every culture has viewed mountains as spiritual places, and ours is no different. Busy modern people often experience much more peace, tranquility, contemplation, and wonder in the hills than do in a church service.

So it only seems natural for someone to say, “My church is in the mountains.” People tire of average sermons and average music and all the difficulty of church life. They prefer to be alone with God, beholding his glory in the theatre of Creation. How can the boring people of a church community compare with majestic vistas? God himself beheld the Creation and said it was “very good”. Can’t we join humanity’s consensus that communion with God in nature is the pinnacle of spiritual experience?

We can only answer that by asking, Why are the mountains so peaceful for us? Why such satisfaction in looking out on lakes and trees and glaciers? It is not only that these wonders display God’s glory (they do!), but we are also grateful to find not a soul in sight. The greatest source of stress and anxiety in our lives is people. It makes perfect sense that tranquility would come by getting as far away from them as possible.

That is why (by definition) the mountains can never be our church. The word church means “assembly.” It is the very opposite of a backpacking trip in the Cascades. Church is the gathering of all the difficult people that Jesus has chosen in love and folded into the family of God despite their many flaws. Church is emphatically communal, and so it is always crushing the desire of our flesh to get away from people. God is not pleased by us always running away from all these messy sinners. He is most pleased by us doing the hard work of becoming their family. That hard work often won’t feel like tranquility, and so it may not feel spiritual either.

Why does God want this? The truth is solitude in nature can be self-indulgent. It may be restful, it may fill us with wonder, it may even be a gift from God, but it will never be the primary place to train us in love. We will never have to face our bitterness or covetousness or critical spirit unless there are people to draw such sins out of us. We will not have to learn compassion and patience and forgiveness unless there are people to love in these ways. Ultimately, in nature alone we will not become like Jesus.

Now you might object: didn't Jesus go up on the mountain to pray and be with his Father? Fair point. Actually, more than a fair point. You the reader may have the opposite problem from what I am describing. Maybe you are with church people all the time and never go on a mountain alone to be with your Father. If that is the case, you actually will become more like Jesus alone in the mountains. Go do it! Enjoy!

But many people go up into the mountains to find God. Recreation is a spiritual adventure. The gospel teaches us though, that we don't go on adventures to find God. He came on an adventure to find us. He came down to us in the boring world of Galilee, in the poor man Jesus. He came as a man who had no beauty that we should desire him (Is. 53:2). Still today, God comes down to us by his Spirit, through the means of grace entrusted to the church. The church too often has no beauty that we should desire her. We meet God in Christ by faith. We meet God in the church by faith too.

The fact that the church is full of people is the very thing that makes it so much harder to do than going on a hike, but so much more pleasing to God. The rewards of communal church life are also greater than recreation. Church life trains us to take pleasure in the things that God does. When we are willing to engage our spiritual life with a church family, we find that the joys of community deepen over a lifetime, while many outdoor enthusiasts find that a lifetime of adventures eventually lose their thrill. At our core, we were made for love, and love needs people. So while we will receive times of solitude as gift from God, we must not call the mountains our church. Church is the body of Christ. Church is a place of people, because church is the place of love.