Going to Chruch with a friend

Bringing a friend with you to Church, does it hurt you or help you?

I've often wondered about this and tonight I am going to come up with both sides of the arguement and let you decide for yourself.

Going to Church with friends is bad. It distracts a person from being able to truly focus on what is going on and it prevents the person from fully engaging in what is going on during the Mass. Although the intentionns are good, bringing a friend to Church distracts you from what is really important. This is because the act mixes two parts of your life that are, for a teenager,  mostly incompatable; the social and the religious life. How can one truly focus on God when their good friend is sitting their next to them. How can you truly be alone with God in company? You can not. Go to Church alone or with your family.

Going to Church with friend is good. I mean, isn't that what basically what we are supposed to do anyway. The Church is, after all, the PEOPLE of God, not the person of God. We are supposed to consider every single person in the Church with you a friend anyway. That being said, what could be wrong with bringing a close friend along with you. Isn't this only better? Furthermore, how much easier is it to feel God's love when we are feeling it with a friend? When we connect with eachother we connect with God. Jesus' greatest command was to treat eachother as we wish to be treated. By doing this in Church, do we not become closer to Christ? Our friends support us in our faith, bringing us closer to God. This does come with certain conditions however. Make sure that all contact you have with your friend is directed towards the furtherment of eachothers faith: make certain that all other matters wait until after Mass. As long as you do this, you should be fine! So take a friend, an aquaintance, a girlfriend, whoever you want, as long as you feel that it will help.

Personally, I think going with friends to mass is definantly a positive.