"We're just here for the metaphors, ma'am."

“Being in church no more makes you a Christian than being in a garage makes you a car.” It’s a cliché, but is it a valid cliché?

On its face, the metaphor is actually quite telling. After all the main thing you do in fact find in garages is cars (outside of Phoenix, that is). So the statistical case you could make is that it’s very reasonable to expect that if you know a large object is in a garage, it’s a good bet it’s a car. To put it another way, if “Family Feud” asked 100 people to name something found in a garage, the top response wouldn’t be “giraffes.”

Even so, it is possible to be in a garage and not be a car just as one may be in a church and not be a Christian. But whereas garages don’t normally transform their contents into cars, churches do in fact often make people Christians. Entering a garage won’t make you a car, but entering a church at least increases your odds of being turned into a Christian. And unless the evangelist is intending to communicate the total inefficacy of preaching to convert people and hence the futility of attending church (including his own!), he may want to be more careful in his choice of illustration.

Being in church doesn’t guarantee you’re a Christian, but it is both a natural precursor to this happening and a natural result of it already having happened. And given that so many people these days are wondering aloud whether they even need to go to church, perhaps we should employ less costly metaphors.