Do I Really Need the Church?

This guest article is by Rev Benjamin E. Castaneda, Lecturer in Greek & New Testament, Edinburgh Theological Seminary.  The article initially appeared in The Record, August/September 2024.

Do I really need the church?

You need the church.

That statement might sound a bit...odd. Maybe even controversial. I need the church? Jesus, yes. The Bible, yes. But in our individualistic, me-centred culture, it sounds more than a little narrow-minded to say that I need the church.

Speaking personally, I have many family and friends who claim to be Christians but are not members of a church or even attend a church regularly. Inevitably they mention all the things that are wrong with the institutional church, or how most churches misinterpret the Bible, or how they are doing just fine in their walk with the Lord without entangling themselves in a group of (often hypocritical) Christians.

There was a man named Cyprian who thought differently. He was a church father in North Africa in the 200s. He endured fierce persecution from the Roman Empire and was eventually martyred for his faith. Cyprian held the church in such high esteem that he wrote, ‘You cannot have God for your Father unless you have the church for your mother. If you could escape outside Noah's ark, you could escape outside the church’. Just in case someone might think Cyprian was exaggerating, he elsewhere went on to say something even more radical: ‘Outside the church there is no salvation’.

We might be tempted to dismiss Cyprian. ‘That’s the Roman Catholic view’, we casually retort. But besides being anachronistic, this same view of the church was warmly embraced by John Calvin thirteen centuries after Cyprian. Calling the church our ‘mother’, Calvin says, ‘Our weakness does not allow us to be dismissed from her school until we have been pupils all our lives. Furthermore, away from her bosom one cannot hope for any forgiveness of sins or any salvation’ (Institutes 4.1.4). Cyprian’s statement even made it into the Westminster Confession of Faith, which says, ‘The visible Church…consists of all those throughout the world that profess the true religion; and of their children: and is the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ, the house and family of God, out of which there is no ordinary possibility of salvation’ (WCF 25-2).

The Reformed tradition is insistent that salvation and the church are closely tied together.  But why is that the case? 

The church’s necessity is tied to its nature. What the church is means that you need it and must belong to it. In the rest of this article, I simply want to point out three features of the church’s identity.

First, you need the church because the church is the Body of Christ. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German pastor who lived under Nazi persecution, and like Cyprian, he was eventually executed. In his slim but weighty book Life Together, Bonhoeffer wrote, ‘No one can become a new man except by entering the church and becoming a member of the Body of Christ. It is impossible to become a new man as a solitary individual’.

The apostle Paul put it this way: ‘There is one body and one Spirit––just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call––one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all’ (Ephesians 4:4–6). The motto of the United States is ‘e pluribus unum’, which is usually translated, ‘out of many, one’. Paul wants us to know that this is doubly true of Christians. By repeating the word ‘one’ over and over in this passage, Paul underscores the tremendous truth that God has brought about in Christ a radical unity that transcends our diversity. And just to be clear, the words ‘you’ and ‘your’ in this passage are plural. Paul is not addressing individuals. As the context makes clear, he expects his ancient (and modern) readers to tangibly express their unity in Christ because they have been bound together by their shared belief in the gospel, their collective experience of baptism, and the joint privilege of calling upon God as ‘Father’.

By being united to Christ, we are consequently united to one another. He is the hub of the wheel, and we are the spokes. To use more biblical metaphors, he is the vine, and we are the branches (John 15:1–6). He is the head of the body, and we are the members (1 Corinthians 12:12–14; Col 2:19). He is the cornerstone, and we are like living stones being built up into a spiritual house (1 Peter 2:4–8). Bonhoeffer was right; the Christian life is not a solitary life. ‘Lone-ranger Christianity’ is an oxymoron.

Second, you need the church because the church is the place of promise. It is the theological location where God has promised to work by his Holy Spirit. God can, of course, work wherever and however he pleases to bring a person to faith in himself. He is a sovereign God; we cannot put limits on how the Spirit might choose to work.

Yet at the same time, God has also chosen to bind himself to do the work of saving and sanctifying his people in the context of the local church through the regular use of the ‘ordinary means of grace’: the preaching of the Word, baptism and the Lord’s Supper, and prayer (WCF 5-3; WLC 154). Week after week, Sunday after Sunday, between the call to worship and the benediction, as law and gospel are faithfully proclaimed from all the Scriptures and as the promises of God are portrayed visibly in the sacraments, Christ builds his church. It is here that the weak are encouraged, backsliders are warned, sinners are called to repentance, and the gates of hell are beaten back.

Finally, you need the church because the church is a band of brothers. As God’s new- creation people (see 2 Corinthians 5:17), we have a responsibility to live lives of holiness (1 Peter 1:14–16). Anyone who has tried to start a new habit (or break an old one) knows that you need people in your life who will offer encouragement and accountability. The same is true spiritually. The church is governed by godly men called elders who will give an account to God regarding your spiritual welfare (Hebrews 13:17). Elders are under-shepherds of Christ’s sheep who care about your soul and have been charged to invest themselves in your spiritual growth (1 Peter 5:1–4). One implication of these passages is that we must submit ourselves to their oversight (1 Peter 5:5). To ignore or reject this oversight is to say that you are mature enough to find your own way and don’t need correction (a remarkably arrogant assessment!).

Individual believers have a responsibility here too. Our Sunday gatherings should be far more intentional than the customary weekly ‘check in’. According to the author of Hebrews, we have a mutual obligation to ‘consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near’(Hebrews 10:24–25). This means we sometimes must have hard conversations, speaking the truth in love to point out sins and blind spots. But we also must always have each others’ backs like a military unit in wartime. When someone is weak and wounded, we carry them to safety. When someone is weeping, we weep too. Corporately we practice Paul’s instructions to ‘admonish the idle, encourage the fainthearted, help the weak, be patient with them all’ (1 Thessalonians 5:14).