Best thing I heard last sunday was a pastor asking his congregation if they believed people who never come to their or any other building but stay at home can receive the same blessings from God that they feel they receive by showing up each week - then he said its a personal relationship - wonder how many "pastors" say this openly to their brothers and sisters these days ?

Before Christmas 2022, I took on this subject - exactly as you have presented, with an online Associate Pastor and asked him to back his statement of "you won't be blessed unless..." up with scripture. Of course they use Hebrews 10:25 BUT... I posed the fact that I am handicapped and unable to attend a church with oxygen concentrator that isn't quiet. That the Holy Spirit dwells among the sanctified as promised, 24/7... no matter their location, that the Church is a body of believers who individually house as a temple, the Spirit of God.

That a good Christian friend is mine lives in the high mountains and comes down twice per year for 1 week to gather supplies, see a dentist and doctor and returns to his cabin. He has no one but himself and God.

Is he doomed? Heavens NO! God, Jesus, Holy Spirit and him. That's more than two gathered. No...the use of Hebrews 10:25 in this instance is to raise finances. In many churches today, this is the case.

Many seem skilled at presenting that which fills their coffers and as I found God I wasn't in a "church" and never owned a bible, and as it is written, God is spirit, Christ came to take us out of mans temples, giving us the gift of The Holy Spirit which resides within the True Temple of God, our own bodies.

My mother found God on her father's cattle ranch. She would walk in the wilderness and realized over time, that all the beauty and the natural order of things could not have just 'happened'. There had to be a creator, some being that created everything and set it in motion - and still filled her heart with love and longing and promise.

God calls to people, even if they have never been in a church before or heard the gospel before.

Look at the robber on the cross next to Jesus - he never set foot in a church, was never baptised, but Jesus promised the robber would be with him in paradise that day.

My mother was saved, and later she married my dad and thru her daily example, my father was saved. I was raised in a Christian home, by parents who loved Jesus very deeply and weren't afraid to show it.

Churches, and pastors, put rules on salvation and bind salvation in chains. Often they will unlock them for a financial price - that's not Christianity. That's bribery. God know