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Author Rebecca McLaughlin has a PhD from Cambridge. She just released a book called How Church Could (Literally) Save Your Life. In it, she makes a data-based argument that one of the best things you can do for your mental and physical health is to do this thing called “Go to church on Sunday.” She writes:
Imagine someone hands you a box of pills. You open it and 52 tablets meet your eyes. You read the printed information and it claims this medication—if taken weekly—could elongate your life by seven years, significantly increase your chance of happiness, and substantially reduce the likelihood you’ll suffer from depression. Thinking this is too good to be true, you check the side effects. They’re listed as a greater sense of meaning, greater likelihood of volunteering, and more generosity toward those in need. Once again, you’re skeptical. This must be a scam. You turn to the back of the box to see where this information comes from. There you find this medication has been extensively tested by none other than the Harvard School of Public Health. Would you take the pills?
I would! In fact, I am! Every Sunday, I crawl out of bed, I put on my best preaching jeans and a worship hoodie, and I show up at Northeast Christian Church to take my medicine. I’ve come to learn that weekly worship works! And just to clarify … “online church” is not a comparable replacement.
Tyler VanderWelle is the Director of the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health. It’s his research that McLaughlin builds her arguments on. Summarizing Harvard’s findings, Christianity Today reported:
Unlike researchers on this topic from decades past, who primarily produced underpowered cross-sectional studies, VanderWeele and his contemporaries have conducted robust longitudinal studies with cohorts numbering in the tens of thousands. The findings are striking. Church attendance reduces all-cause mortality by nearly 30 percent over a 15-year period and protects woman against suicide by 400 percent. Weekly churchgoing in women over 40 is as protective against death as annual mammograms, McLaughlin writes. Those attending services more than weekly at age 20 have “a roughly seven-year greater life expectancy than their nonchurchgoing peers.” Churchgoing protects against alcohol, smoking, and drug abuse and decreases the odds of depression by one-third.