Church: Monstrous or Misunderstood? (Part 2)

            As a child, one of my favorite scenes in The Little Mermaid was when Ariel seeks out the help of her eccentric seagull friend named Scuttle.  She shows him some human objects she has found in the hopes that he can tell her exactly what they are and what they do.  When she pulls out a fork, Scuttle announces that it is a dinglehopper, which the humans use to style their hair.  His excitement grows when she pulls out a tobacco pipe (which he calls a banded, bulbous, snarfblat), and he tells Ariel that it is a prehistoric item that was invented to make music when the humans got tired of sitting around and staring at each other all day.  In an attempt to demonstrate his claim, Scuttle blows on the pipe, and all that comes out the other end is sand and seaweed.  He’s convinced that something is wrong with the snarfblat. 

            Like Scuttle, many people look at the church today with one idea about what it is and what it does, and when what they see conflicts with that belief, they get frustrated and think that it must be broken.  As a result, they eventually toss it in the garbage as something that is useless at best and dangerous at worst.  They think they are throwing away a broken snarfblat when, in reality, they are discarding a perfectly functional tobacco pipe that was never meant to produce music.  Just like you make sure you don’t throw anything valuable into your waste basket, you should know exactly what the church is and what it is supposed to do before you walk away from it.  For part two of this series, I just want to begin looking at what the church is.

            According to Richard A. Seymour’s Systematic Theology: A Basic Outline Based Upon Lewis Sperry Chafer’s Eight-Volume Systematic Theology, the term “church” means “a called out assembly” (Ch. 8 Pg. 1).  From this small statement, we already know that the church is a group of people.  This truth has at least two major implications.  First, the church is not a holy building or a place.  My husband and I are a part of The Crossing Fellowship, which currently meets in a community building called the Senior Center.  We have friends at a church plant in Torrington, WY who have met at the fairgrounds for many years.  Buildings of all shapes, sizes, and styles are used as a gathering place for the church.  The building itself is not the church.  It is merely a tool to be used by the church.  Second, since the church is a group of people (all of whom are sinners), it cannot save anyone.  Only Jesus saves.  “Going to church” does not make up for sin because church is not a place to go, and even if it were, sin is a debt that cannot be paid by a Sunday morning service.  It can only be paid by the pure, sinless blood of Jesus.      

            Now that we have a basic definition for the word “church,” let’s dig a little deeper.  The New Testament uses the word “church” in a couple of different ways.  In some verses, it is speaking of what is called the universal, or invisible, Church (from here on out, I will capitalize the word when I am referring to the universal church).  The universal Church includes all true believers in Jesus Christ of all nations from Pentecost until the Rapture (if you have no idea what those are, you can read about them in Acts 2 and 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18 respectively; just know that we fall into that time frame).  This is a very unifying truth that crosses all barriers of race, gender, and social status.  One of the clearest pictures I have experienced of the universal Church is that of singing a worship song in English around a campfire in the French Alps and then hearing the same song sung in Portuguese and French by European believers.  Even though we struggled to communicate clearly and relate to each other culturally, our worship was just a glimpse of the fact that we were bound together by something much deeper and much more intangible than language or culture.  Of course, God is the only one who can see into the hearts of people, so He is the only One who can see the universal Church accurately and entirely right now.  However, that doesn’t diminish the fact that true believers all over the world are tied in a bond that is tighter than blood itself.

            The New Testament uses several analogies to describe the nature of the Church and its relationship with Jesus Christ.  It speaks of the Church as the bride of Christ and as the body of Christ.  The Church is also described as a family and as a flock of sheep with Christ as the Shepherd.  There are several more, and we could spend a great deal of time delving into them all, but I just want to make a couple of brief observations based on the few I just mentioned.  The Church is incredibly precious to Christ; He loves it and cherishes it as a husband is called to love and cherish his wife (Ephesians 5:25, 29).  He cares for it as a whole and as individuals, just as a shepherd cares for his flock and searches for even one that gets lost.  In turn, the Church knows and follows Christ as her Shepherd (John 10:11-18).  As the Head of the body, Jesus directs the Church and has authority over it (Ephesians 1:22, 23).  The Church is so much more than a mere committee, club, or organization.  It is a family that has been knit together by the Holy Spirit, and a true believer cannot simply refuse to be a part of it.  It was woven into his or her very identity at the moment of salvation.  As a family, we need each other desperately, and Scripture cautions us against isolating ourselves from our brothers and sisters (Heb. 10:24, 25).                    

The second sense in which the New Testament uses the word “church” is that of the local church.  The local church, or visible church, refers to a specific group of professing believers (for example, The Crossing Fellowship in Gothenburg, NE or the Sterling Berean Church in Sterling, CO).  Within this local group, there may be unbelievers as well as believers.  There may even be people who say they are Christians but have never really understood what it means to trust in Jesus alone for salvation.  The local churches we are familiar with today are much different than the ones talked about in Acts.  The earliest local churches had minimal organization, though they did have specific leadership positions and observed specific ordinances (The Lord’s Supper and Baptism).  On the development of the organization of the local church, Seymour writes the following:

“In the beginning there was no apparent organization of all churches under one head [to clarify, he is referring to one ruling governing body, not to Christ].  This idea was developed by men at a later date, as evidenced in church history.  However, it is not found in Acts or the Epistles of the New Testament.

Thus, to the very simple form of the New Testament church, much has been added throughout the centuries.  Some of these changes have been necessary and in the will of God in view of changing conditions.  Other changes have been of the flesh and harmful.  On these questions a wide variety of opinions exist; therefore we have many different types of local churches.  It is the duty of each believer to seek God’s will for himself in this matter and make his choice accordingly. 

However, there are two extremes to avoid:

                  A.  Over-emphasis on organization.

                  B.  Denial of any organization” (Ch. 8 Pg. 5).

            Like the universal Church, the local church (which we most often think of when we hear the word “church”) is like a family in many ways.  It is made up of spiritual elderly, adults, teenagers, children, and infants.  As was mentioned before, some members of the group may not even be spiritually alive yet.  These all come from different backgrounds, and they certainly don’t always agree on everything (which is partially why some level of church organization and leadership is needed – similarly to how a family thrives best with structure and clearly defined roles).  All of these individuals have to learn and choose to be biblically unified for the sake of Christ (this was something Jesus specifically prayed for during His time on earth in John 17:20, 21!).  Division in the church breaks God’s heart, and it is painful for all who are involved – much like divorce.  Unity does not happen automatically.  It is developed as individuals learn to set aside minor disputes and differences for the sake of Christ and seek to be unified as a heavenly nation that does not operate the way this world operates.  Unity grows as the individuals of a church align themselves with the truths of Scripture and are transformed by those truths.    

Transformation takes time, and members of a local church need grace just as much as anyone else.  One important truth that we often forget is that no matter where individuals of the church are at in their spiritual growth, none of them are finished yet.  All of them still have a sin nature, and all of them still sin to some extent.  No one is perfected in this life.  While true believers should live by a different standard than this world, we cannot simply write them off as nothing but hypocrites when they give in to sin.  Christ is the one who is hurt the most by such actions.  He already took the punishment for that sin, and He will deal with His disobedient children in loving discipline, whether it be through the channels of church leadership or something else.  Justice should be left in His hands and never used as an excuse to isolate or to disobey His call to be unified as one body.  Instead, we should pursue reconciliation, restoration, and forgiveness with others whenever possible in the way that Jesus gave His very life to reconcile, restore, and forgive us.      

For those who have stuck out this lengthy post, I sincerely hope that it has helped you to see the Church as a whole as well as your local church just a little more like God sees them.  We have barely uncovered the tip of the iceberg of all that Scripture has to say about the Church, so don’t assume that this post is exhaustive by any means.  God has a lot to say about His beloved Church!  Thinking and studying through these things again has been good for my own heart.  I’ve been reminded of how valuable the Church really is to God and how much I should cherish getting to be a part of it.  Join me next week to talk about what the Church is supposed to do!        

                               

Seymour, Richard.  "Ecclesiology."  Systematic Theology: A Basic Outline Based Upon Lewis Sperry Chafer's Eight-Volume Systematic Theology.         Theology 2.  Frontier School of the Bible.  North Building, La Grange, WY.  2012.  Lecture.