Why Church?

Recently, upon reading through Henry Nouwen's great book "Making All Things New", it was reinforced to me just how critical the idea of "gathering together" is to developing a spiritual life.  In fact, his claim is that it is the combination of the disciplines of solitude and community that makes space for the Spirit of God to work in and through the lives of Jesus followers.  Our culture seems to think that it has the idea of solitude down, if by solitude you mean that there is no need to join together as a "church" in order to really follow Jesus.  As our group has wandered through the discipline of solitude and understood the tremendous difficulty in trying to pry that into our oversaturated lives, I have begun to see the idea of disciplining ourselves for community to be at least as much or possibly even more daunting a task. 
Don't believe me? ... Try establishing a new gathering of people who are already following Jesus during a Seattle Summer and you'll understand a bit more of what I'm referring to.  Here's the thing that we're hitting up against, and by "we" I mean the universal "we" of the Western world version of the Christian faith .... we've not gone about this idea of gathering together as a spiritual discipline.  We've not seen it as ultimately strengthening our movement forward along a path that leads ever closer to Christ.  We see it more as a task, an option, an "if nothing better comes along" event.  Within that framework, just about anything that comes along can be seen as "better"
I will offer that I believe a decent amount of this mentality arrived as a consumer culture collided with the lost mission of too many churches.  Right about the time that it became more about being "right" than offering good news to those who really needed to hear some, people who had consistently gathered began to become inconsistent and then cease altogether.  
We've lost our way ... and this could be seen as totally tragic, except that losing ones way implies that there was once a way that was considered "the way" ... and we could once again be heading that way.   I will insert some pastoral honesty here ... for most of my 20+ years leading churches I would have attributed the inconsistency of my people in their gathering together as their own personal spiritual lacking.  In recent years, with some painful self awareness and evaluation, I have come to the conclusion that I, and others like me, need to own a decent amount of this lacking.  I, as a leader of a gathering of Jesus followers, at this point in the history of the church, have to believe that a decent piece of this just may come from my failure to excite people about the real mission that God has invited us to which can only be accomplished through the gathering known as the church.  We can be on mission with the God of all creativity, and yet we are infected with infighting about how creativity can be expressed.  We can be on mission with the God who owns everything, and yet we sit wringing our hands lamenting how little resources we have.  Is there a wonder that, even among those already trying to follow Jesus that there are always "better" things going on?
We, as these gatherings, have been tasked as well as enabled, to turn our piece of the world, our cities and all of our represented neighborhoods, upside down.   Instead of cowering in the corner of comfort until we have "figured it out", we could run into the wake of the God who has already been there and be filled with the awe and wonder that the Old Testament prophets were able to experience and we have resigned ourselves to merely reading about.  What could be "better" than that?