Does the Bible say you have to go to church?

The strongest verse is Hebrews 10:24-25, which urges believers not to give up meeting together but to spur one another on toward love and good deeds. It is an exhortation about mutual encouragement, written to a community under pressure, and it says nothing about buildings, denominations, service times or membership. Matthew 18:20 sets the threshold for a gathering at two or three. So the New Testament does ask for gathering. It does not describe the institution most people picture when they hear the word church.

Are there Christian traditions without clergy or church buildings?

Yes, several, and some are centuries old. The Quakers have met since the 1650s with no clergy and largely in silence. The Plymouth Brethren meet without a paid ministry. House church movements, including very large ones in China, gather in homes as the norm rather than as an emergency measure. Anchorites and hermits, including Julian of Norwich, practised in solitude with the church's blessing.

What is the strongest argument against practising alone?

Not loyalty to an institution, but correction. A faith with nobody in it who can contradict you will drift toward whatever you already wanted to believe, slowly enough that you will not notice. Most of what the New Testament asks of a person also requires other people to do it to, and there is no way to be carried through a bad year by a practice you do entirely by yourself.

Library · Practice

Can you follow Jesus without a church?

A question a lot of people cannot ask out loud where they live. Here is what the texts require, what they never mention, who has been doing this for four centuries, and the argument against it that deserves to be taken seriously.

TL;DR

The New Testament does ask for gathering. Hebrews 10:25 is a real verse and it is worth reading properly rather than explaining away.
It never mentions buildings, denominations, membership rolls, service times, or a professional clergy class in anything like the modern sense. Those are later, and they are not the same thing as gathering.
Matthew 18:20 sets the bar at two or three. That is a table, not an auditorium.
Whole traditions already practise without clergy or buildings, some for nearly four hundred years.
The serious argument against going it alone is not loyalty. It is correction: a faith nobody can contradict drifts toward whatever you already wanted.
Solitary practice needs more structure than congregational practice, not less. This is the thing that quietly ends most of it.

The verse they will quote at you

“And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day approaching.” Hebrews 10:24–25

It deserves better treatment than it usually gets from either side. People who have left tend to wave it away. People who stayed tend to deploy it as a rule about Sunday attendance. Both are misreading it.

Read it for what it is asking. The subject of the sentence is spurring one another on and encouraging one another. The meeting is the means. The author is writing to people under real pressure, some of whom are drifting away quietly, and the concern is that a person on their own gets cold and nobody notices.

What the verse does not contain: a building, a denomination, a service, a time, a professional to run it, or any indication that the gathering is the institution rather than the people. Those are all read in.

And then there is the threshold Jesus sets, which is remarkably low:

“For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them.” Matthew 18:20

Two or three. A kitchen table clears that bar. So does a standing Tuesday phone call with one friend who will tell you the truth.

What the New Testament never mentions

This list is not an argument that any of these things are wrong. It is a correction of a very common assumption, which is that they are the baseline and anything else is the deviation.

Church buildings. The first communities met in houses. Dedicated buildings appear roughly two centuries later.
Denominations. The concept did not exist. Paul's response to the first hint of one, at Corinth, is that it is a symptom of immaturity.
Membership rolls and formal joining. No New Testament writer describes a process of becoming a member of an organisation.
An eleven o'clock Sunday service. Gatherings in Acts are daily, in homes, and involve dinner.
A single professional running it. Leadership terms in the letters are plural, local and functional. The single-bishop structure is still being argued for in the early second century.

The longer version of that history, with the sources, is here.

People who have already been doing this

If practising outside a conventional congregation felt like a modern invention, it would be reasonable to be suspicious of it. It is not.

The Quakers, from the 1650s. No clergy, no liturgy, no sermon. Most meetings sit in silence and someone speaks only if they are genuinely moved to. Nearly four centuries of practice built on the conviction that the light is available directly.
The Plymouth Brethren, from the 1820s, who rejected a separated professional ministry on principle.
House church movements, including enormous ones in China, where meeting in a home is the normal shape of the thing rather than a wartime compromise.
The Anabaptist tradition, which from the 1520s treated the state-backed institutional church as the thing to be left.
Hermits, anchorites and solitaries, an honoured vocation for most of Christian history. Julian of Norwich, whose Revelations of Divine Love is the first book known to be written in English by a woman, wrote it while living enclosed in a single cell beside a church.

None of that proves anything about your situation. It does mean that if someone tells you this is unprecedented or self-evidently modern self-indulgence, they are mistaken about the history.

The argument against, which is better than you expect

Most of what gets said to people who leave is not really an argument. “You'll backslide.” “You're just hurt.” “You want a faith with no demands.” Those are accusations wearing a reason's clothes, and they are usually said by someone protecting an institution.

Underneath them, though, are four things that are actually true, and it would be dishonest of this page to skip them.

1. Correction

A faith with nobody in it who is able to contradict you will drift toward whatever you already wanted to believe. Slowly. Comfortably. You will not feel it happening, because the mechanism that would let you feel it is the thing you removed.

2. It takes other people

Almost everything the New Testament asks a person to do is transitive. Forgive, bear with, serve, give, confess, welcome the stranger. A practice with no other people in it quietly turns into a practice about your own interior weather.

3. Being carried

There will be a year when you have nothing. In a congregation, people show up with food and keep praying on your behalf while you cannot. A solitary practice has no provision for this, and you find that out at the worst possible time.

4. People unlike you

A congregation is one of the last places where you are stuck with people you did not select: different ages, politics, class, and temperament. Anything you assemble yourself, online especially, will tend to be full of people who already agree with you. That is more comfortable and much less formative.

Point four applies to this website, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. A commons of seekers who found each other because they think alike is not a substitute for a room containing an eighty-year-old who disagrees with you and will still bring you soup.

And the thing the argument skips

Everything above assumes the congregation available to you is safe. For a lot of people it is not, and that deserves to be said plainly rather than handled delicately.

People leave because they were told their questions were rebellion. Because they watched an abuser protected. Because they were outed, or shunned, or made a cautionary tale from a stage. Because the price of belonging was agreeing to something they did not believe, out loud, weekly.

“Don't forsake the assembling” is not an instruction to keep attending a place that is harming you. Nothing in the texts requires that. If the choice is between a damaging congregation and no congregation, no congregation is not the spiritual failure it is often described as.

What a practice can actually look like

Here is the part nobody tells people when they leave. Practising alone requires more structure than practising in a congregation, not less. The building was carrying scaffolding you did not know you were using: a time, a rhythm, a text you did not choose, and people who noticed when you were not there.

Remove it and replace it with intention, or it will simply stop, and you will conclude you lost your faith when what you actually lost was a calendar.

A fixed time. Not “when I feel like it.” The monastic tradition solved this sixteen centuries ago with fixed hours, and it works for the same reason it works for exercise.
A text you did not choose. A lectionary, a psalm a day, a gospel read straight through. The point is to meet the parts that do not flatter you, which is precisely what self-selected reading avoids.
Silence. Short and regular beats long and rare. Ten minutes is enough to begin.
A daily examen. The Ignatian one is five steps and takes ten minutes: notice the day, give thanks, look honestly at what happened in you, face the one thing you would rather not, ask for tomorrow.
Two or three people. Whatever form it takes. This is the one most likely to be skipped and the one that carries the most weight.
Something that costs you. Money given, hours served, a person actually helped. Practice with no cost drifts into self-soothing within about a year.
A sabbath. One day that is genuinely different. The oldest and most ignored instruction in the whole tradition.

So: can you?

Honestly: you can follow Jesus without an institution, and you cannot follow him without other people. Those are two separate sentences and the confusion between them is doing a lot of damage in both directions.

A denomination is optional. A building is optional. A paid professional is optional. All three are later additions to a movement that grew without them.

The table with two or three people at it is not optional. It was there from the beginning, and it is the part that is genuinely hard to replace.

This page is part of the Deeper Waters Library: cross-tradition explainers for seekers who want primary sources rather than slogans. Related: what the first followers of Jesus were called and what a Christian agnostic is. This site is a commons, not a congregation, and we said above why the difference matters. If you want to sit with this alongside other people, you are welcome here.