There is an old joke that Wikipedia doesn’t work in theory but it does in reality. In the same way, Church’s don’t make a lot of sense but they’ve worked for thousands of years. I kind of think of it as a thing like the family, which also doesn’t make sense in some regards, but it’s proven its “value”. I hate using that argument because you could argue for a lot of stupid things that way, but it’s one way of looking at the situation.

Also I noticed you used the word “efficient”. What if meeting people is supposed to be inefficient, what if “efficiency” in meeting people is the worst possible thing to “optimize” for. Sometimes when meeting people is slow, when you’re forced to get along because “oh man this guy goes to the same church and could tell on me if I’m rude and whatever he’s the most interesting person I’ve met so far” you force yourself to discover better understandings and deeper connections with people. Maybe that in the end is what religion is about.

EDIT: Also something beautiful about being connected to the humans of thousands of years ago and doing similar rituals as them. The connection to human ancestry, sometimes more so than god, is another beautiful thing about religion. Even among the Chinese, which is not a very theistic society, this is noted in their traditions of ancestor shrines and worship