Four Convictions about the Church
I was back in the church, but I was not yet reconciled to the church. Obedience was important, but I still needed to come to terms with the nature of the church and with God’s purposes for the church. When I entered seminary, I started learning theology and biblical languages and I began to examine what God’s word said about the church. The first thing I had to reconcile was what God said about the church.
Paul’s letter to the church in Ephesus reveals the primacy and irreducibility that God gives to His church. I could no longer ignore this fact. In the opening of the epistle, Paul writes,
“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him.” (Ephesians 1:3–4)
What Paul is saying is that the church existed long before the creation of the world and long before the necessity of salvation. The church is not instrumental but ontological. There is an ontological reality to the church that is eternal; or in more philosophical terms, the church’s essence precedes its existence.1
To state the case more simply, the church exists to be something long before it exists to do anything. I had always believed that the church existed to accomplish something. I thought God created the church to save souls but what Paul said is that even before the foundation of the world God had a purpose for the church. The church was not created to accomplish a goal, the church was created to be something in the presence of God; to be holy and blameless in his sight.
The church existed in Christ before the foundation of the world and was created to both possess and reflect the glory of Christ for all eternity. The church is not a “necessary evil” or a weak instrument that God uses to try and accomplish his purposes on earth. No, the church is the bedrock reality upon which every Christian stands.
The church is fundamental, irreducible, foundational, and primary. If I am going to be a Christian, then I’m simply not permitted to understand my Christian life apart from the church. To be a Christian is to be part of Christ, which is to be part of the church. As a result, I came to my first and settled conviction about the church; the church has primacy, therefore the church cannot be ignored.
Having established the primary nature of the church, Paul then goes on to reveal its role. The doing of the church follows its being. Paul shares the glorious purpose of the church when he writes,
“I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given, to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ, and to bring to light for everyone what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God, who created all things, so that through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. This was according to the eternal purpose that he has realized in Christ Jesus our Lord, in whom we have boldness and access with confidence through our faith in him.” (Ephesians 3:8–12 ESV)
God has a plan for the church, first to be something but then to do something. The church’s purpose is to reveal the manifold wisdom of God. Paul elsewhere shares that the cross is the power of God and the wisdom of God (1 Corinthians 1:24). The church, then, is commissioned by God to reveal the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. The revelation of the reconciling work of Jesus on the cross goes through the church, into the world, and is proclaimed even to the principalities and powers of the heavenly places.
The church has simultaneously a local and cosmic responsibility to bear witness to Christ. This responsibility cannot be shared, outsourced, or offloaded to any other organization. It is invested in the church alone. No parachurch organization can accomplish what the church is called to accomplish. No NGO or non-profit can substitute for the church. The second conviction is the church and the church alone is the God-ordained means by which Christ reconciles a lost world back to the Father.
The third conviction had to develop in my heart rather than in my mind. I grew sour on the church over the years. There was ample evidence in my own experiences to suggest that the church militant was broken, that it frequently hurt its members, and that it was in many ways unlovely. Sharp feelings about the church formed in my heart and they hardened.
Not only did I distrust the church, but I grew to dislike the church. I came to see that my feelings about the church were negatively affecting my understanding of the church and as a result, my participation in it. Those feelings needed to change, and they did, first through God’s word and then through the expulsive power of a new affection.
In Ephesians 5, Paul instructs husbands on how to love their wives. Relationships can often and easily become disordered, and disordered loves result in disordered lives.2 Paul showed that a husband’s rightly ordered love for his wife is directly informed by Christ’s love for the church.
“Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. In the same way, husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body.” (Ephesians 5:25–30 ESV)
Jesus is the head of the church, just as a husband is the head of his wife. The relationship that Jesus has with the church is rightly ordered, not only positionally but also affectionally. The church is the bride of Christ, and Christ loves his church. This love is not abstract but concrete and real. As I thought about this, something obvious emerged in my mind: if I’m going to call myself a Christian and claim that I love Jesus, then I am simply not permitted to hate what Christ loves.
My love for Christ was disordered and I thought I could love Christ without the church. But if Christ loves the church and he gave his life for her, then as a Christian, I too must love the church. It seems self-evident now, but I had lost sight of this basic truth. I had to be confronted by the truth. And just because I understood it intellectually doesn’t mean my affection for the church immediately improved. That change would take more time as new affections entered to displace old resentments.
19th-century Scottish Divine, Thomas Chalmers preached a sermon on 1 John 2:15, which he titled “The Expulsive Power of a New Affection.” In the sermon, Chalmers explains that one cannot simply stop loving something they ought not to love. You can’t just rationally evaluate your disordered love to see its downside and then walk away from it.
Instead, misshaped affections must be replaced by a far greater power, namely the love of God. Over time I had carefully cultivated a disdain for the church; you might even say that I had grown to love hating the church. This was a deeply disordered love that needed to be expunged, and the only way that was going to happen was through God’s love displacing the disordered love within me.
If I call myself a Christian it is because Christ first loved me. As a Christian, the first thing I have to submit to is the reality of God’s love for me. We love because Christ first loved us (1 John 4:19 ESV). This love is sacrificial, perfect, and freely given, even while I was still a sinner. “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13 ESV). It is a perfect love and perfecting love. It is a love I don’t deserve and yet Christ gives it to me. “But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8 ESV).
Christ offers his love and gives it away so that the object of Christ’s love (me!) might thrive. When I started to get a better sense of how much God loved me, that changed the way I thought about other things Christ loves. Christ loves me and he loves his church with a holy and glorious love, so if I love Christ then it only follows that I would love what Christ loves. Soon, I started to notice a change in my feelings for the church as my third conviction solidified; I can’t hate what Christ loves, nor do I want to.
My final conviction about the church developed years later, as my faith became more creedal. My Christian upbringing was charismatic, which meant that I was exposed to few if any traditional liturgies growing up. It wasn’t until much later that I was introduced to the Apostles’ Creed, and later still until I started reciting it with regularity in worship. I have since grown to love the Creed and appreciate the formational power it has on my life.
Creeds are doctrinal statements. The English word “creed” comes from the Latin word “credo,” which means “I believe.” A creed is a statement of faith; an attempt to summarize the main points of what Christians believe. Creeds are not exhaustive, nor are they meant to be, rather they serve as a “Rule of Faith.”3
Coaches remind us that “the standard is the standard.” To say that the Creed is the standard or the rule of faith is to say that this statement contains the minimum, necessary beliefs we must claim in order to be a Christian. The Creed reminds us of the measure of our Christian commitments. The Apostles’ Creed is the standard of belief to which we must submit and be conformed.
Creeds are not summaries of doctrines that we simply believe cognitively, nor are they expressions of what we think, and they are not opinions we hold. Creeds are statements of trust. When we say “I believe,” we are saying “I place my trust in…” Reciting the Apostles’ Creed allows us to exercise our faith. Pastor Jeff Meyers summarizes this point eloquently when he writes,
Credo is the Latin translation of the Greek word pisteuo, which is precisely the word that is used for “faith” in the New Testament. When the congregation says, “I believe [credo, pisteuo] in God the Father Almighty,” they are not stating an opinion or even assenting to a doctrine. They are confessing their personal trust, their faith in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. “I believe [credo, pisteuo]” is exactly equivalent to the language of personal trust used in the New Testament: “I believe in” or “I place my faith in” or “I trust in.” The creed allows the congregation to verbalize publicly their faith and trust in the God who redeems in Christ Jesus through the work of the Holy Spirit. There is no doctrine of justification by faith articulated in the creeds because the creeds express the faith of justified sinners. (Jeffery J. Meyers. The Lord’s Service: The Grace of Covenant Renewal Worship. Moscow: Canon Press. 2003)
Every time we say the Creed we renew our faith in who God is and what God has done, and we remind ourselves of necessary beliefs upon which we stand. Every time we recite the Creed we have the opportunity to take our stand on words, words that we believe are true and trustworthy. In the Apostles’ Creed, we say, “I believe in the holy catholic church.”
As a Christian, I must believe in the irreducibility of the universal church for the Christian and the necessity of the local church for my faith. We exercise our faith by reciting the Creed weekly. Reciting the Creed regularly makes us into the kind of Christians who are resistant to the idols of our day.
There is a training in the Navy Seals called “drown-proofing” in which candidates bob up and down in water for extended periods with their hands tied behind their backs, as well as their feet. The experience is meant to train soldiers to overcome the fear of drowning and to grow confident in the water. Reciting the Creed is similar to drown-proofing. Each week we recite the Creed is an act of “idol-proofing,” making us more confident in God and in the church, as we make our way through a sea of worldly idols.
C.S. Lewis said it wasn’t easy to believe in the forgiveness of sins, which is why we should recite our belief regularly in the Creed. He said,
We say a great many things in church (and out of church too) without thinking of what we are saying. For instance, we say in the Creed “I believe in the forgiveness of sins.” I had been saying it for several years before I asked myself why it was in the Creed. At first sight it seems hardly worth putting in. “If one is a Christian,” I thought, “of course one believes in the forgiveness of sins. It goes without saying.” But the people who compiled the Creed apparently thought that this was a part of our belief which we needed to be reminded of every time we went to church. And I have begun to see that, as far as I am concerned, they were right. To believe in the forgiveness of sins is not nearly so easy as I thought. Real belief in it is the sort of thing that very easily slips away if we don’t keep on polishing it up. (C.S. Lewis, “On Forgiveness,” The Weight of Glory.)
The same thing goes for belief in the necessity of the church. Belief in the the church is not nearly so easy as we might think. It can easily slip away, just as it did when I was a teenager. It can slip away when we see a pastor fail. It can slip away when we read about another church scandal. It can slip away when we see members of the church fighting each other, gossiping with one another, or behaving in ways otherwise indistinguishable from the world.
But Jesus believes in the church. And even though the church is assailed, and though it might look enfeebled and though it might act impotent and compromised, Jesus said, “the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matthew 16:18 ESV). And so I eventually came to my fourth and final conviction about the church, that I believe in the church, and I believe that God will accomplish his purposes through the church because he loves the church and gave his life for her.
Photo by Stormseeker on Unsplash
- For a fuller treatment of the ontological primacy of the church, see Simon Chan’s chapter on “The Ontology of the Church.” Simon Chan. Liturgical Theology: The Church As Worshiping Community. Downers Grove Ill: IVP Academic. 2006. ↩︎
- Cf. David K. Naugle. Reordered Love Reordered Lives: Learning the Deep Meaning of Happiness. Grand Rapids Mich: William B. Eerdmans Pub. 2008. ↩︎
- “Rule” as in a ruler by which we measure; a standard for measurement. ↩︎
The Parrhesians 