I can already picture some people gagging at this blog's title. "All roads lead to church?! What a nightmare!" For some the word "church" stirs up images of boring sermons, awkward small talk, fake smiles, power-hungry leaders, or worse. And it make sense because those things really do exist in varying degrees in churches. In Part 1 of this series we established whole-heartedly that the Church is deeply flawed and has a lot to be sorry for. But in Part 2 we also cautioned against taking your specific negative experiences of church and projecting them onto all churches everywhere and especially onto the biblical understanding of the Church. So as we go on to describe Church as something that God Himself deeply cherishes, please do not in your mind assume that I am necessarily talking about your specific experience in a church.
A Partly-Helpful Perspective
For any follower of Jesus, participating in a church is necessary. However, I think the reason Christians often give for the necessity of Church is partly good but partly misleading. Here's what I mean. Typically when you hear a Christian talk about the importance of belonging to a church community they will say something like this: "Nobody can do this Christian thing alone. You need other people to help guide you, support you, and encourage you along the journey." On the one hand that is a great point. It is true that trying to maintain a thriving faith without a community around you is next to impossible.
But on the other hand that point is unhelpful because it reduces the value of a church to its usefulness to me. Church is worthwhile as long as it encourages me and helps me grow in my faith. This way of thinking inadvertently feeds right into the hyper-individualism of our culture and ultimately puts the value of Church on a shaky foundation. As soon as a person feels that belonging to a church is no longer useful, or their faith is not getting stimulated, or that they can find stronger friendships elsewhere, they will see no more reason to belong to a church.
The Biblical Perspective
In contrast, the story of the bible is the story of a Father creating a family. From front to back, in every genre and book of the bible God is working to bring individuals together to make a community. Not as a means to an end, but as an end in itself. A community united with one another and with God is the goal.
Creation
It begins in Eden in Genesis 1 and 2, where God creates Eve to be with Adam because it is not good for any human to be alone.
Abraham
After describing the downward spiral and splintering of humanity in Genesis 3-11, God's response is family: specifically, the family of Abraham. God promises Abraham a big family (many descendants), and says that through his family all families of the earth will be blessed.
Israel
Abraham's family eventually grows into the nation of Israel, and the nation of Israel eventually becomes the kingdom of Israel. Throughout the Old Testament importance is placed on the people (i.e. the community) of God. This is not to say individuals are unimportant--the Old Testament is full of stories of individual people!--but those individuals are always striving towards the betterment of the nation.
the laws are given to instruct Israel on how to be a community
the Psalms are given to be the prayers and songs of the community
the prophets give messages of judgement and hope to the community
the historical books tell about the rise and fall of the community.
Jesus
When Jesus stepped on the scene, hands down without question his favourite topic was "the kingdom of God"--and what is a kingdom if not a community living under the authority of a King? For Jesus the kingdom of God is something that was being birthed "in the midst" (Luke 17:21) of his group of followers. The common denominator in all the varying places Jesus visited or individuals Jesus interacted with was his band of disciples that were following him around. This was the spiritual "family" that he was training and shaping so that they could eventually establish more spiritual families in the book of Acts and beyond.
New Testament Letters
Few things were more important to the early leaders and participants of the Jesus movement than being a community (i.e. church) with one another. Indeed Paul, who wrote most of the books of the New Testament, was primarily a church-planter. His writings in the bible are actually just letters he wrote to churches as someone devoted to the starting and flourishing of communities of Jesus-followers. And when we pay attention to the big-picture purpose of each letter we see that almost every aspect of them is there to directly or indirectly promote the health and unity of the church (watch this video summary of Galatians as just one example). Paul uses lofty metaphors to describe the Church: the Church (i.e. the community of Jesus-followers) is God's temple (1 Cor. 3:16), Jesus' body (1 Cor. 12:27), Jesus' wife (Eph. 5:31), and God's house (1 Tim. 3:14-15). Temple, body, wife, and house--you can't get much more important or valuable than those!
New Creation
In the book of Revelation, John picks up especially on the metaphor of the Church as bride. The reuniting of Jesus ("the bridegroom") with his community of followers ("the bride") is treated as the climax towards which everything in Revelation is moving towards: "Let us rejoice and be glad and give him glory! For the wedding of the Lamb [i.e. Jesus] has come, and his bride has made herself ready" (19:7).
To be clear, I did not write this post to guilt-trip people deconstructing their faith or nursing wounds from toxic churches to go back to church. If you are seriously deconstructing or have been wounded by the church, you have an understandable excuse for not participating in a church community!
Rather, I'm primarily aiming this post at bible-believing Jesus-followers who perhaps did not see much value in participating in a church. I hope that by tracing the centrality of community through the bible it's become clear that participating in a church community is not only helpful but more importantly it has been God's goal for the world since day one!