I HAVE spent a lot of time this year telling audiences of all sizes to “just go to church”. For most of them, this is a new or strange idea. I am often invited into gatherings that are trying to figure out how to fix polarisation, or climate change, or loneliness. Somewhat to my surprise, having gone deep into the theories and policy solutions around many of our most pressing challenges, I have concluded that they share a root: the loss of habits of collective ritual, shared attention, and covenantal community.

When I propose to audiences asking these questions that religious practice might be a necessary part of our future, I don’t do it like a saleswoman. I warn them that, if they do deign to show up to church, they will most likely find it annoying. The people they meet there will rub them up the wrong way. The leader will say something that makes them wince. The institution will disappoint, the service won’t adapt to their preferences, and, if they stand still for five seconds, they will end up on a rota.

I am not telling people to go to church because it will serve their comfort or convenience. They should go with low expectations, I say, but, crucially, go anyway. There isn’t an alternative. We don’t seem to be able to do without it. Ultimately, to whom else shall we go?

BIZARRELY, this has been one of the most effective evangelistic techniques that I have found. When I made this case at a day conference, speaking alongside Dr Iain McGilchrist to people interested in the “future of humanity”, seven people came up to me afterwards and said that I had persuaded them.

For some of them, their spouses had been asking them to go to church for years. Most had never been before. Something about a pragmatic under-promising worked for them. Various of them have been in touch to say that they have, in fact, been to church, and, yes, it was annoying, but they think that they will go again. They enjoyed it more than they expected to. Sometimes, low expectations help us see what still, even in the wreckage, is beautiful.

In his book Low Anthropology, David Zahl makes a similar case for human nature. So much of the hurt that we cause each other is because we expect people to be better than they are — better than we (when we are honest) are ourselves. We do not want them to be frail and failing, selfish and cynical. This leaves us primed for disappointment. Having low expectations of others can, unexpectedly, throw their very real graces and gifts into sharper relief.

I MAKE this case also about living in community. We are based in a very small experiment in intentional community in Peckham, what I call a micro-monastery and The Times called a middle-class commune (Press, 14 June). People come to us and ask how they can do the same, and my answer is similar: lower your expectations, and do it anyway. Shed your utopian dreams, your rose-tinted idealism, and you might have a chance of finding your way through into the earthy, uncomfortable, and uncompromising beauty of knowing and being known, up close.

It is, perhaps, the hardest time of year for what I have come to call my liturgy of low expectations. Our collective longing for Christmas to be magical, to sate our hunger for the enchantment that the rest of the year fails to deliver, is tangible. Just for this one day, surely, the food can be delicious, the presents delightful, the family able to speak kindly to each other. It’s the most wonderful time of the year. It has to be. We must make it so.

And, as with my other examples, it is precisely these expectations that can render it so difficult. It is another reason that I feel more and more relaxed about saying: just go to church. Go and hear the story of a Christmas (the Christmas), which was stressful and uncomfortable and disorganised and socially awkward; which smelled not of cinnamon and cloves, but of animal muck. It was beautiful anyway. The light that was coming into the world was met with low expectations (“Can anything good come from Galilee?”) and over-delivered on them all.

This low-expectations approach to Christmas can make it easier to relax. It might help us to see that inviting a few oddballs to share our table is the definition of traditional (and at least these ones are unlikely to smell of sheep). We can laugh at the chaos and the burnt stuffing and the sprout farts, and thereby more clearly see the treasure under the rubble, the moments of grace that glint in the darkness. The indescribable gift.

Elizabeth Oldfield is a journalist, public intellectual, and the host of the podcast The Sacred. Her book Fully Alive: Tending to the soul in turbulent times is published by Hodder & Stoughton (Books, 17 May, Feature, 24 May); 978-1-3998-1076-0. She will be speaking at the Church Times Festival of Faith and Literature 2025. faithandliterature.hymnsam.co.uk