Certainly, Christians have, and are to cultivate, private fellowship with God. But if that is all we have—if we do not worship with God’s people and become actively engaged and involved in the lives of God’s people, simultaneously allowing them to become engaged and involved in our lives—then we are obscuring the image of God that we bear. God’s purpose is not met by a large group of individual Christians. God’s purpose is met by the church—a community of people bearing God’s image, bearing it in fellowship with each other, and worshiping the One who made them. So often, Christians feel an impulse to separate themselves from the church, whether that impulse arises from self-absorption, or from an insistence upon personal preferences, or from the retention of old grudges. But true and full humanity is found not in seclusion, but in communion. True and full worship occurs not as an individual distances himself or herself from the church, but as that person seeks to fold himself or herself ever more into the church.

STEPHEN G. MYERS, GOD TO US – COVENANT THEOLOGY IN SCRIPTURE, 112.