What is the Church?

Rarely a day goes by that I don't see someone posting an article about the church on my Facebook timeline or Twitter feed.  Some of the articles are good, some are really bad.  It seems that everyone is talking about the church, but what is informing our thinking on the church?  Sadly, I think what's being said in most of the articles I read and the personal conversations I've had is based on feelings and personal experiences rather than an informed understanding of what God has told us about the church in Scripture.  Since much of what I hope to write in the future will relate to the church, this will be the first of a series of posts attempting to give a brief, concise introduction to a Biblical understanding of the church.  

The first and most basic question is this: what is the church?

I think most Christians would rightly say that the church is a people and not a building or organization.  But who are the people? I like Wayne Grudem's definition.

The church is the community of all true believers for all time.

What this means, and I recognize that not everyone agrees with me on this point, is that everyone from Adam and Eve until Christ's return who is brought to genuine faith in Jesus Christ is a part of the church.  The Old Testament saints didn't know Jesus' name, they didn't see God's redemptive plan unveiled as we who live on the other side of the cross and resurrection do, but we were all saved by Christ's once for all sacrifice.  Scripture clearly and repeatedly affirms that believing Jews and Gentiles have been united in one body in Christ.

So there is only one church.  Why is it then, that in my hometown alone there are hundreds of churches, and millions more spread out across the inhabited world?  This is because the church is both invisible and visible, universal and local.

The Church Universal

The invisible church is the church as God sees it.  It includes all those true believers in all times and places who were chosen in Christ before the foundation of the world, predestined for adoption in Christ, redeemed by Christ's blood, and sealed with the Holy Spirit (Ephesians 1:3-14).  The invisible church is universal.  The true believer in an American megachurch is a member of the same church as the true believer meeting in secret in a house in North Korea.  We are one body, to use one of the Biblical metaphors for the church, or collectively we are the bride of Christ, to use another.  

The Local Church

If we are all one church, then why are there so many churches, sometimes meeting across the street from each other at the same time?  The answer is that the church is also local.  The local church is the visible church, what we see.  The visible church contains true churches and false churches, and among true churches you will find more pure and less pure churches.  When we talk about the church, most often we are talking about the visible church.  

You might then ask, “If there is one universal church, is it wrong for true believers to meet in different church buildings across the street from each other?”  The answer is no.  If those churches are in conflict with each other or competing against one another there is a problem, but from the earliest days following Christ's ascension we see people meeting together in large groups and small gatherings.  As the church spread around the world people in Antioch didn't pack up there belongings and move to Jerusalem, they stayed in Antioch and began their own church.  They were one body with the Jerusalem church, but meeting in a different location.  When Jesus spoke to the seven churches in Revelation he called each one "the church in (city name)." In Titus 1, Paul instructed Titus to appoint elders in every town.  Paul's letter to the Ephesians, which has its central theme the unity of the church in Christ, was written to a group of local congregations in and around Ephesus.  

The Importance of Distinguishing the Universal and Local Church

This distinction between the universal church and local church, the invisible and the visible, is an important distinction to make. When someone has a bad experience with “the church,” is hurt by “the church,” is frustrated with “the church,” or says they’re leaving/have left “the church,” they are referring to the visible church, a specific local church or local churches.  There are important questions for an individual who feels this way to ask, and questions that I’m afraid most people don’t ask.

Was my bad experience with the church because I was in error and the church was acting in accordance with Scripture?  Or was the church clearly in violation of Scriptural teaching?  

Is the church a true church or false church, according to Scripture?

Are my expectations of the church based on a robust Biblical understanding of the church or my personal feelings and desires?  

Was I genuinely wronged, is the local church genuinely in error, or were not yet perfected saints behaving like not yet perfected saints?  Even if I was genuinely wronged, what has God told us about how to respond when wronged?

Church history is full of examples of people responding to one error by overreacting and committing the opposite error.  A period of hyper-legalism is followed by a period of licentiousness (the current state of American evangelicalism, broadly speaking).  A period of institutional church excesses and abuses is followed by people thinking they don’t need the church and will just meet together without any kind of structure at all (a small sub-sect of American evangelicalism at the present time).  It is important when we recognize errors in the visible church that we don’t respond with an equally unbiblical error.  The opposite error of an error is still error.  We must always seek to return to Biblical faithfulness, conforming our local churches to what God has told us they should be.     

Future posts in this series will deal with what the New Testament identifies as a faithful local church and what the purpose of the church is.