There are several reasons people give for not regularly attending Mass on Sunday despite claiming to be believers. A common one might go something like this: “I can just pray on my own each Sunday. I don’t need to go to Mass to have a relationship with God.” 

 

People making such claims can convince themselves that they’re actually keeping the Third Commandment, while not making an effort to attend Mass. 

 

But such a response reveals a fundamental mistake about the God that we Christians claim to believe in. Likewise, it demonstrates a misunderstanding of what our responsibilities as believers are, as well as what the Mass offers us and calls us to do. 

 

To begin, claiming some sort of equivalence between praying on our own and attending Mass shows a failure to grasp the basic relationship we are called to have with God. 

 

God has never revealed a desire to have isolated individuals believe in Him and worship Him apart from being in community with other believers. Just the opposite, our prayer and worship is to be joined with the prayer and worship of others. 

 

There’s never been a time in Christian history of where individuals just worshipped on their own rather than communally and saw it as acceptable or the norm. To quote Jesus Himself, “Every kingdom divided against itself will be laid waste, and no town or house divided against itself will stand” (Mt 12:25). 

 

God always seeks to gather people together. We are called to form a “people,” a “body,” an “assembly.” Throughout Scripture we see this over and over again — God calling people together, forming a community, not just disparate individuals. 

 

While He does love us as individuals and does want that personal, intimate relationship with each of us, He also wants us to come together with, and because of, a shared faith. A few examples from Scripture might help. 

 

We can look at Jesus’ teaching in a verse like Matthew 18:20, “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.” Likewise, Hebrews 10:25, reminds us: “We should not stay away from our assembly, as is the practice of some, but encourage one another ... .” 

 

Finally, in the 12th chapter of Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians he reminds us that we are all members of the Body of Christ and that each part of that Body is a member of something bigger than itself and is joined to the entire Body. As such, if the Body of Christ is to function as it was intended, each member must fulfill his or her responsibilities to the whole Body. That begins, for each of us insofar as we are able, in ensuring that we take part in the most important prayer of the Church — the Mass.

 

Being content with simply praying on our own rather than attending Mass also shows that our focus is really on us and what each of us as individuals can do, rather than on God and what He has done, and what only He can do. 

 

While personal prayer is a tremendously good thing and absolutely necessary, it doesn’t have the ability to make Jesus present in the Eucharist. That is something that only happens at Mass. 

 

Nor does it have the power to connect us to the community of believers the same way that prayer and worship together does. Our connection to God cannot stop at just a “God and me” relationship, but must rather become a “God, others and me” series of relationships. 

 

The communal aspect of our faith can also certainly be challenging at times, perhaps even making us wish it was just “God and me.” But we cannot expect to fully live the faith or be mature in the faith without a connection to the community of believers. Hence the importance of living the Third Commandment according to God’s desire, rather than our own.