Why Your Church May Be the Most Important Factor in Your Wellbeing

THE FLOURISHING LIFE  •  Post 9 of 10

Human Flourishing  |  Faith  |  Jay Poland, MA, LCPC, IBCC Certified Human Flourishing Coach

I want to make an argument that might surprise you, even if you already attend church regularly.

The research on human flourishing suggests that participation in a faith community is likely the single most significant contributor to long-term flourishing of any identifiable factor. Not income. Not education. Not health behaviors. Not even close relationships, as critical as those are.

A faith community.

If that sounds like a pastor making a self-serving argument, I understand the skepticism. But this is not my conclusion. It is Tyler VanderWeele's, drawn from some of the most extensive empirical research on human flourishing ever conducted.

What the Research Actually Shows

VanderWeele's work at Harvard identifies four primary pathways through which people tend to flourish: family, work, education, and religious community. Of these, religious community consistently emerges as the most powerful.

People who participate regularly in a faith community show measurably higher rates of happiness, life satisfaction, meaning and purpose, physical health, and strong social relationships. They also show lower rates of depression, anxiety, and substance use. And according to one landmark study, they live significantly longer.

What makes a faith community uniquely productive, compared to a civic organization or a sports team, is that it integrates every domain of flourishing simultaneously. Community, meaning, moral formation, service, and a framework for making sense of suffering, all in one context. No other single institution does all of that.

Formation, Not Just Attendance

I want to be honest, though, because I think this finding can be misapplied.

The research is not simply arguing that showing up to church on Sunday makes you flourish. It is pointing toward something deeper: genuine formation within a community of faith. That means participation that involves belonging, learning, serving, and being known.

Attending a service where you are anonymous and disengaged is not the same thing. What the research captures is the effect of genuine community: people who are actually connected to one another, who carry each other's burdens, who hold each other accountable, who serve and pray and grieve together.

"And they devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers… And all who believed were together and had all things in common."
Acts 2:42–47

The early church described in Acts was not an audience. It was a community. It was characterized by devotion, generosity, shared life, and contagious joy. And it drew people in.

Communities Flourish, or Languish, Too

Here is something the research presses us to consider that I do not think gets enough attention in the flourishing conversation:

Flourishing is not only a property of individuals. Communities themselves can flourish or languish.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, writing from indigenous ecological wisdom, observes that "all flourishing is mutual." No living thing thrives in isolation. Health is always embedded in relationship and interdependence. What is true of ecosystems is equally true of human communities.

This means that a faith community's health is not simply the aggregate of its members' individual well-being. It is something the community itself either embodies or fails to embody. A congregation can contain many individually stable people and still be a community that is not flourishing, one marked by conflict, passivity, isolation, or a lack of shared purpose.

And on the other hand, a community that is genuinely flourishing, where people are formed, connected, sent, and engaged, creates conditions in which individuals grow in ways they simply could not on their own.

VanderWeele's research aligns with this. The power of religious community is not merely that it gives individuals access to resources for their personal well-being. It is that it draws people into a shared life oriented toward something larger than any one of them.

What This Means for You

If you are already deeply embedded in a faith community (truly known, genuinely serving, authentically connected), this research affirms something you may already sense. You are somewhere significant.

If you are attending but not quite connected, present on Sundays but not much beyond that, I would invite you to consider that the next step toward flourishing may not be a program or a self-help resource. It may simply be going deeper where you already are.

And if you have drifted from community, whether through a painful experience, a season of doubt, or simple inertia, I hope the research gives you reason to reconsider.

You do not flourish alone. And neither does the community around you, unless you are in it.

Stay Connected & Keep Growing

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Next in the series: Post 10, The Road to Flourishing Starts Where You Are