Church Is … Something We Can’t Live Without
We are so suspicious of authority and institutions. It's an artifact of post-modernity, wherein from pluralism the golden rule is no longer “treat others as you would want to be treated” (Matt 7:12), but rather, “judge not lest you be judged” (Matt 7:1). This abuse of that verse is used to support a social ethic of “I’ll do whatever I want, and you can’t tell me I’m wrong.” Truth (and right and wrong) has become subjective, rather than objective, truth.
If there is no objective authority, then it is only what you choose it to be. When applied to the church, that looks like people saying, “I love Jesus but I hate the church.” Or, “I am a Christian but I think organized religion is a problem.” If you say that then you are saying two things here. First, you are saying that though you love Jesus, you hate his bride. That doesn’t work with anyone else, so why would it work with Jesus? If you were to tell me, “Matt I like you, you’re awesome, and I love spending time with you, but I don’t like your wife. She annoys me and I think she sucks,” then at the very least we would definitely not be friends anymore. Why would this be any different with Jesus? Because he gives grace and love? Yes, he does, and it is precisely that grace and love that keeps him from smoking us whenever we belittle his wife while trying to justify our behavior.
Secondly, by saying you love Jesus but reject the church, you are actually saying that you love Jesus but not enough to obey him in his Word about his church, his authority over you, and his design and will for your life. Which, of course, is not loving him at all as we know from 1 John 5:2-4, “By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and obey his commandments. For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome. For everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world—our faith.”
You can’t have it both ways: either you are the authority, in which case you don’t love Jesus, or he is the authority, and in which case you do. Spoiler alert: Jesus has all the authority (Matt 28:18).
There are no lone wolf Christians
Why do we need the church at all? Simply, Jesus has not designed his people to be lone wolves, because lone wolves living outside the pack die easily from starvation. Similarly, predators that hunt herds of prey (lions vs. antelope, for example) isolate an animal from the rest in order to exhaust it and then kill and it. The Bible says, “Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour” (1 Pet 5:8). Do you need the church for protection? Yes. A Christ-exalting, blood-bought, and redeemed, Spirit-filled person will worship Jesus within the protection of the community of faith that God the Father has given them.
And yet protection is hardly the first thing we think of when considering why we need the church. We also need it because inherently the church is Christians gathering and being together. Poet John Dunne said, “No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” Likewise, 1 Corinthians 12:12-15 says, “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit. For the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot should say, ‘Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,’ that would not make it any less a part of the body.”
Therefore, Christians cannot be disconnected from the body—or the herd or the pack—any more than your toe can be isolated from your foot and expect it to still function. The church is the community of called-out and set-apart believers. Just as God called Abraham out of Ur and through him made a nation to declare God’s sovereignty over the other nations, so too has Jesus created a people united to him and thus able to be reunited with God, sent to declare God’s sovereignty over other peoples. It inherently is a community of gathered peoples united together, not individuals doing their own thing.
The church is a gift to Christians
We need the church for protection, and we need the church because it is fundamentally and foundationally part of our identity, but we also need the church because it matures us. The church is a gift because it helps the individuals within it look more like Jesus through the exercising of spiritual gifts in ministry with each other. There are many passages about spiritual gifts, but my favorite is Ephesians 4:11-13, which says, “And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ…”
Why has God given the church these various types of gifts? Jesus says through Paul that it is (1) “to equip the saints for the work of ministry,” (2) “for building up the body of Christ,” and (3) that we may be unified in faith and the knowledge of Jesus for our maturity. People who reject the church can’t be a part of this. Lone wolf Christians can’t be a part of this. Only those in the body of Christ benefit from the gifts given to its members, mainly, that we would be matured and look more like Jesus! The Holy Spirit sanctifies us as the body gathers together and uses its God-given gifts in loving service.
One key way we lovingly serve each other is through prayer. Though God the Father hears our prayers through our ultimate and final intermediary, Jesus (meaning we don’t need dead saints, Mary, or earthly priests to pray for us), the church is nonetheless a vehicle through which prayerful intercession to God occurs. How much more do we feel supported when we know our faith family is behind us, supporting us, and taking our concerns to the foot of the cross with us? This is brothers and sisters joining us in battle, joining us in our grief, and joining us in our joy.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was martyred by Nazi Germany for refusing to capitulate to the state by ceasing to gathering with other gospel-confessing Christians, says in Life Together,
“The Christian needs another Christian who speaks God's Word to him. He needs him again and again when he becomes uncertain and discouraged, for by himself he cannot help himself without belying the truth. He needs his brother man as bearer and proclaimer of the divine word of salvation … It is easily forgotten that the fellowship of Christian brethren is a gift, a gift of the Kingdom of God that any day may be taken from us, that the time that still separates us from utter loneliness may be brief indeed. Therefore, let him who until now has had the privilege of living a common Christian life with other Christians praise God's grace from the bottom of his heart. Let him thank God on his knees and declare: It is grace, nothing but grace, that we are allowed to live in community with Christian brethren.”
Jesus has made a family of believers for believers. He has rescued us from our sins, and through his blood, we are adopted by God into his family. To say we do not need this is to say we do not need God’s gracious gift of family, which he clearly thinks we need. Therefore, church is simply something we can’t live without.