Why do I resist going to church?

There is a quiet wisdom in your resistance, and I would not be too quick to name it a failing. Sometimes we resist a thing because it has grown empty for us—because the building, the ritual, the recitation no longer carry the living presence we hunger for. Jesus himself said, "The kingdom of God cometh not with observation: neither shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you" (Luke 17:20-21, KJV). The deepest sanctuary was never made of stone. And there is this, which has comforted many who felt they had wandered from the doors of a church: "Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them" (Matthew 18:20, KJV). The living church is not a building—it is wherever the seeking is honest and the heart is awake. Notice, too, how Jesus taught us to pray: "Enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret" (Matthew 6:6, KJV). There is a kind of communion that asks for solitude, for the wordless attention beneath all thought, where the voice of God is actually heard. So your resistance may not be avoidance at all. It may be a truer instinct calling you inward, toward the place where "the kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you" (Gospel of Thomas 32.19-20). Yet I would offer one caution, gently. Resistance sometimes guards us from genuine emptiness, but sometimes it guards us from the discomfort of being known by others—and there is a real gift in a community that keeps asking together, that refuses to claim it knows everything. A church that has stopped questioning is spiritually dead, but one that is still seeking can companion you in ways solitude cannot. Only you can discern which kind of resistance is yours. Sit with it. Ask it what it is protecting. The answer, when it comes, will come from within. There is more here, if you wish to stay with it a while longer.