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The Church, why bother?
Matthew 16:13-19
We Believe Sermon Series #15
It seems that people either swear by the church or swear at it. They’ll say things like, “I love Jesus but I don’t like the church.” “I believe in God but who needs the church.” “I’m spiritual but I’m not religious, so I don’t go to church.” “I can worship God out on my snowmobile or on the lake or on the golf course or in bed, I don’t need to go to church.” “The church is full of hypocrites.” “The church is just after my money.” Is the church irrelevant?
Visit Europe and you will see cities littered with abandoned churches. Our inner cities are filled with abandoned churches. Those empty churches are symbolic of the powerful influence of secularism in our culture today. Secularism does not seek to destroy religion, but it tries to define religion as being private, having no place in public or social life. So in a secular culture, religion and faith are treated as the private possession of the individual. In America today the vast majority of people embrace a secularized, watered down version of the Christian faith. As George Gallup shows every year, the people of America are among the most religious people in the world, as the overwhelming majority say they believe in God, believe the Bible is the word of God, and believe that Jesus is God’s son. But this watered down veneer of Christianity is a secularized version of faith, as the vast majority of people view church as a kind of optional expression of faith reserved for the few who need that sort of thing.
So in a secularized society like ours is the church a dying institution? Are empty churches monuments to another past more religious time? While interest in spirituality is on the rise, attendance of church is on the decline. Recently a University of Wisconsin professor of history named Thomas Reeves wrote a book called The Empty Church: Does Organized Religion Matter Anymore? Reeves demonstrates that since the 1960s virtually every traditional Christian denomination has lost between one‑third and one‑fifth of its membership. The average church in America today is composed of less than 75 people and it’s getting older and smaller with each passing year. The average church only reaches one new person with the good news of Jesus Christ each year. Many are calling the 21st century the dawn of a post‑denominational era, when most traditional Christian denominations close their doors. Reeves believes that the reason why this has happened among mainline denominational churches is because many of their highest leaders have rejected the essential points of the Christian faith.
By the time you go to bed tonight, eight Christian churches in America will have closed their doors for good. As you drift off to sleep, more than 7,600 professing Christians in North America and Europe will have left the Christian church for good. Church involvement for most professing believers is an optional part of the Christian faith, nice if you have time and your alarm happens to go off in time to make it, but not an essential component of the spiritual life. But in some ways this radically individual way of viewing the Christian faith is nothing new to our culture. Christian faith in America has always been largely a private, individual thing, with little need for social expression through the church.
The Apostles’ Creed affirms, “I believe in the holy universal church, the communion of saints.” But our culture and many professing believers affirm, The Church, why bother? Why bother? Because the church is Jesus’ plan for this age. Turn to Matthew 16:13-19 (p. 694).
The gates of Hell are not even close. In spite of those who have predicted the demise of the church, even in America if you took all of the people who attend professional sports games all year long—including football, baseball, basketball, hockey, and soccer—all of them!—and add them all up, the grand total does not even come close to the numbers of people who attend church in any given year in America. The church is the most important institution in the history of the world. It’s the largest institution that has ever existed upon the face of this planet.
Most importantly the Church is the work and ministry of the Holy Spirit. The church without the Spirit is like a body without a life. The Holy Spirit has been at work since the birth of the Church on the day of Pentecost, calling people out of sin, out of isolation and chaos, into communion with God and with His people, into worship, service and into the lives of other fellow believers.
In an earlier study, I brought attention to the fact that belief in the Holy Ghost and belief in the Holy Universal Church are closely and intimately associated together. The one belief is dependent upon the other. It is because we believe in the Holy Spirit that we are able also to believe in the Church. Historically, it was on the first day of Pentecost that the Church came into active and vigorous existence. It existed in germ, no doubt, before that. In the twelve who left all and followed Christ, in the one hundred and twenty believers gathered together in the upper room, we may see the nucleus of the Church, the raw material of the Church. But it was at Pentecost that the Church was born. Pentecost was the Church’s birthday and it is because of the presence of the Holy Spirit that the Church has continued to live. The Church is a supernatural society, and lives a supernatural life. When it ceases to be supernatural it ceases to be a Church, and becomes a social club. Only as the Church is empowered by the Spirit does it become that wonderful and majestic entity which Paul described as “the Body of Christ, the fullness of Him who fills everything in every way” (Eph. 1:23).
This morning as we consider, “I believe in the holy universal church, the communion of saints” we want to work through the key words.
1. What do we mean by the “church”? Two boys were playing outside when one said to the other, “What church do you go to?” “I’m a Catholic. What are you?" The other little boy hesitated for a moment, thinking over the question, he and his family attended a new church that met each week in the home of a man named Horace Klenk. "I’m a Klenk," the little guy answered proudly. His little friend simply nodded and accepted the designation. If it was good enough for his friend, it was good enough for him. When most of us use or hear the word "church," we’re often much like the two little boys in our thinking.
To help us have an accurate interpretation, let’s begin with that word church. When we move from the English back to the original Greek, we encounter the word ekklesia. That Greek word is almost always translated by the word church. When you break it down, you discover that ekklesia comes from two other Greek words: ek, meaning “out of” and the verb kaleo, meaning “to call.” An ekklesia or church then was simply an assembly of those called out of the world and into the family of God. Think of an enormous circle that includes everyone living on the face of the earth. That circle encompasses over six billion people. Now draw a smaller (and still substantial) circle within the larger circle. That smaller circle (of approximately two billion professing Christians) represents the Church. The word church refers to those people who have been called out of the world by God at salvation to join together as followers of Jesus Christ. A church is a “called‑out assembly of believers.” That definition helps enormously because it tells us several key facts...
A) The church is not the building.That’s a common mistake. We say, “Meet me at the church,” but we’re really talking about the building. No matter how lovely it is, this building is not the church and can never be the church. Although it is built of stone, the stones are dead, and the church Jesus is building is made of living stones (1 Peter 2:5). The word “church” in the New Testament never refers to a building. It always refers to people.
B) The church is not a denomination. Sometimes we speak of the Methodist Church or the Lutheran Church or the Catholic Church or the Episcopal Church. That’s a valid use of the English word “church,” but it’s not a meaning found in the New Testament. Denominations are manmade organizations that allow groups of churches with similar beliefs to work together. It’s not a bad concept, and it’s not wrong to be part of a denomination, but the New Testament doesn’t use the word church in this particular way.
C) The church is not Israel. This is very important if we are going to interpret Scripture accurately. Many confuse Israel and the Church. But Israel is related physically with an earthly inheritance and promises. The Church is related spiritually with a heavenly inheritance and spiritual promises.
With that as our background, we come to this phrase of the Apostles’ Creed: “I believe in the holy universal church.” The very wording makes you stop and think. Up until this point, everything in the Creed has been either invisible or distantly historical. When the Creed mentions “God the Father Almighty,” we understand that we cannot see God in His essence. He is hidden from our eyes. The same goes for the Holy Spirit. When we speak of Jesus Christ, we proclaim our belief in a Person who last walked on the earth 20 centuries ago. The Creed so far has led us to confess our faith in God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. But now we make a sharp right turn when we say, “I believe in . . . the church.” After so many exalted phrases, it almost jars the ear to say, “I believe in the church.”
With these words the Creed plunges us deep into the nitty‑gritty of life in the 21st century. Now we’re being asked to affirm our faith in the church, an institution that all too often seems unworthy of our trust. The historical record is checkered at best. Critics like to point out that many of history’s bloodiest wars took place because of religion. Often men killed each other mercilessly in the name of Jesus Christ. One theologian commented that sometimes the church has looked more like a mob than a holy family of God. In our day we have seen respected Christian leaders fall prey to immorality and greed. The sex‑abuse crisis in the Catholic priesthood has tarnished the church (I mean the church as an institution, not just the Roman Catholic Church) in the eyes of many people—believers and unbelievers alike. There was a day when society looked to the churches to provide moral and spiritual leadership. That day (for better or worse) is long gone.
Perhaps you remember folding your hands together, with your finger interlaced downward and saying, “Here is the church, here is the steeple. Open the door and see all the people.” That’s the problem and the challenge and the blessing and the hope of the church, “all the people.” People! If we didn’t have to deal with people, church would be a breeze. But inside every church you find...Difficult people, Contentious people, Mean‑spirited people, Greedy people, Unreasonable people, Unkind people, Thoughtless people, Critical people, Angry people, Cantankerous people...and a lot of them are pastors.
If you doubt that these people exist in the church, just take a good look in the mirror. We’re all sinners in need of God’s grace. If we knew the naked truth about every other person in the church, and they knew the naked truth about us, we’d all run screaming from the sanctuary. The problem of the church is the problem of the people. Someone put it this way, “To live up above with the saints that we love, that will be glory. But to live down below with the saints that we know, well, that’s another story.”
But if people are the problem, they are also the hope of the church. Take away the people and there would be no church left. So the Creed challenges us to set aside our misconceptions and our frustrations and say, “I truly do believe in the church.” We need to say that just as much as we need to say, “I believe in Jesus Christ.” We need to affirm that the church exists because of God, that this all‑too‑human institution that fails too often because it’s full of fallible human beings is still worth believing in because God is involved. He started it, it belongs to Him, and if we are in the church, we belong to him too. These are amazing and even counter-cultural assertions, but they are also completely Biblical. I know that many people have become skeptical and even cynical about the church. Some have been deeply hurt by thoughtless and even cruel church members. But we must not let the foolish acts of others keep us from saying what Christians have said across the centuries, “I believe in the church.” The local church is God’s plan and we must be committed to it. Too often we cut and run when we need to work and pray.
2. What do we mean by “holy”? What do we mean when we say, I believe the church is holy? Do we mean that the church is perfect and sinless? Do we mean when a local church, part of the church of Jesus Christ, gathers, what is actually happening is that a group of absolutely perfect, sinless, totally holy people are found in one place? Is that what we mean? Absolutely not! If you have any doubts about that, let me remind you of the church at Corinth. If you check out what Paul said in the sixth chapter of his first letter to Corinth, he pointed out the kind of people who comprised the church there, and they were a motley crew if ever there was one. You name it, they’d done it. They had come out of every conceivable kind of bad situation, and many of them were still behaving badly indeed. They were far from perfect. They were far from sinless, but they were still called the church. So when we talk about the church being holy, we do not mean that it is a tight little group of perfect people. And the word holy frightens many people because they connect it with a kind of arrogant religious hypocrisy. To say the church is holy can seem to mean “holier than thou.”
The word holy though means “set apart for God.” Anything that belongs to God is holy by association with Him. We call the Bible the Holy Bible because it comes from God and it belongs to Him. The church is holy because the people are holy. The people in the church are holy because they belong to God by virtue of their redemption through the blood of Jesus Christ. 1 Peter 2:9 says that believers are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, and “a people belonging to God.” Those four phrases describe who we are simply by virtue of God’s grace. Those things became true of us by nothing other than God’s work in us. He saved us and then He declared us His chosen people, a royal priesthood, and a holy nation, all because we belong to Him. But that doesn’t end the story. The verse also says God did this so that we may “declare the praises of Him who called you out of darkness into His wonderful light.” That’s where holiness becomes practical. We, the holy people of God, are to live so that we bring glory to the Lord.
To be holy means to go against the tide because the tide is running in the wrong direction. It means to swim upstream because the stream is flowing into the foul pit of destruction. Holiness always involves rejecting the ways of darkness and walking in the light of the Lord. When the church is truly the church, it will be both salt and light in the world. Remember that salt is an irritant and a preservative. If the church doesn’t irritate the world, it isn’t doing its job. G. K. Chesterton put it this way, “A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.” God calls us to “swim upstream” every day, and then He gives us the strength to do it. That means then that we should act differently, talk differently, look differently, think differently, work differently, spend our money differently, entertain ourselves differently. Holiness means that the fruits of the Holy Spirit—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self‑control (Gal. 5:22-23)—have found fertile ground in your life. Are you holy? How fruitful are you? To be holy means to be in the world but not of the world.
3. What do we mean by “catholic”? Turn to Ephesians 4:4-6 (p. 828). Ephesians 4:4‑6 uses the word “one” seven times to emphasize our fundamental unity as believers in Christ. There is one body, one Spirit, one hope, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, and one God and Father over us all. That seven‑fold unity emphasizes the lasting truth that Christ is building one church—not two or three or 15, or 20 thousand, for that matter. The “one church” Christ is building consists of all true believers who have been born again through faith in Christ. They are “the church” regardless of their particular denominational affiliation.
This word “catholic” probably is the most difficult one in the Creed. It doesn’t mean Roman Catholic. There was no Roman Catholic Church when the Creed was first formed. It simply means universal, which is why we say universal, to avoid the confusion. When we say that the church is catholic we are affirming that its message is valid and relevant to every age and situation and every believer is part of it.
The early church demonstrates this wonderful truth about the universality of the Church of Jesus Christ, that there’s ample room for every temperament and personality but there’s no room for party politics or narrow opinions in "the universal church." Two of Jesus’ apostles represented the kind of political opposition we might never expect to mix without explosion. Imagine in our day two Christians—one is a Rush Limbaugh fanatic Republican, the other is a Ralph Nader Green Party tree hugger...and their both deacons in the same church. Would there be any hope of reconciling such opponents?
But the gulf between Matthew the publican and Simon the Zealot must have been as great. Matthew was a collaborator with the Roman government, a tax collector who took his share of the taxes and made his living off the oppression of his own people. Simon was a guerilla fighter, a revolutionary committed to the violent overthrow of everything Matthew represented. Yet the community of believers in Jesus Christ had room for both of them. The Cross, the love of Christ unites us.
You and I have more in common with a believer in the Green Party than we do with a conservative unbelieving Republican. We have a family connection, even though we may differ politically. You and I are to be more united with Chinese believers than we are with lost Americans. That’s one reason why I don’t believe that there ought to be an American flag in the church. The church is not American. Our citizenship is in heaven. There is to be no age, gender, ethnic, economic division in the church. That’s why at Grace we don’t have a contemporary service and a traditional service. That’s an age division. We are to stretch, get out of our comfort zones, learn to be selfless rather self-oriented. That’s what it means to believe in the universal church! That means too that there are believers in various denominations that are part of the Church of Jesus Christ. There are Lutheran believers and Methodist believers and Presbyterian ones and Charismatic ones...and we are united in Christ.
4. What do we mean by “saints”? Who are the saints? We’re all familiar with old‑fashioned Bibles that have the Gospels according to Saint Matthew, Saint Mark, Saint Luke, and Saint John. And we say the saints are the evangelists. Some of us may come from traditions that understand that in the early days when someone was martyred, they were regarded as being extra-special believers and, not infrequently, the place where they were buried was marked by a building in which Christians began to meet. The name of that martyr would then be applied to the church. This tradition is still being carried on, so we have the Cathedral of St. John, St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, etc. Those of us who come from a Catholic background are probably quite familiar with the system of beatification and canonization. Often the idea people have of saints is that they are either martyrs or people who, through their intercession, have performed specific miracles or have been known for their heroic virtue and have been canonized by the church. They picture people with halos floating around their heads. But that’s not what the Bible means when it talks about “saints.” This word “saints” is found 45 times in our New Testaments. The Greek word translated "saints" is hagioi, which comes from the Greek word for holy. It is related to the word sanctified. It’s just a synonym for Christians because every believer is sanctified or made holy by Christ at salvation.
Saints are the ordinary people who make up a church. When we think, therefore, in terms of saints, we think of those who are, first of all, called to be the church of God in a specific geographic location. It bears repeating that church is not somewhere you go; church is something you are. When you get individuals who are called into a relationship with Christ, they then should appropriately come together as a recognizable, visible group of people, recognizably a church. We are called as saints to be the church.
We are called to be sanctified. That means we are uniquely set apart as belonging to Christ and committed to His service. We are called to be identified with Christ as we call on the name of the Lord Jesus Christ. Every time we use the word Christian, we take the name of Christ upon ourselves. Every time we call ourselves the church, we remind ourselves that the etymological root of the English word church is kuriakon or kuriake, which means "belonging to the Lord." So, when we are called to identify with Christ, to be set apart for Christ, to be uniquely the church of Christ, we are, in the strict sense of the word, saints.
Look around this morning and you’ll see that this place is full of saints. Some of them will probably become very deferential about that and say, "I’m no saint." What they mean by that is that they reserve the right to be less than they ought to be. But strictly and Biblically speaking, if you have been called by Christ to be part of His church, to identify with Him, to call upon His name, and to be set apart for His service, you’re a saint.
The word saint simply means "someone who is holy." But Christians are holy, not because of anything they are in themselves but because of the One who has called them. The fact that we are holy has nothing to do with our personal merit or sanctity of life. It has everything to do with the fact that we have been called by a holy God and have responded to Him. We are holy because of our calling, not because of our nature. Think of the moon, which shines by reflecting the light of the sun. As the Apollo moon mission of the 1960s made clear, the moon is a dead world. It possesses no light of its own. But it can reflect the light of the sun. Christians are holy in much the same way that the moon shines at night—by reflecting something (or someone) else. God’s holiness can be reflected in our lives, even if we ourselves are sinners.
Some churches and Christians wrongly suggest though that because the church is a gathering of fellow sinners, we should accept each other as we are and forget this call to holiness. But as John Stott argues, God’s acceptance of us must never negate the need for repentance: “His acceptance means that He fully and freely forgives all who repent and believe, [but] not that He condones our continuance in sin.” Acceptance of one another is only as fellow penitents and fellow pilgrims, not as fellow sinners who are resolved to persist in sin. If we harden our hearts against God’s Word and will, there is no acceptance, only judgment. One form that this judgment takes is for the church to become irrelevant and die. Do we really think that a church that accepts homosexuality has anything to tell practicing homosexuals? The acceptance of sin by the church of God is a shortcut to irrelevance, for the gospel has no power to save when it ceases to challenge the world at the point of sin.
5. What do we mean by “communion”? Robert Bellah, in his book Habits of the Heart, pointed out that one of the great strengths of American society is the freedom of the individual. But one of the great concerns in contemporary American society is that this freedom of the individual has led to rampant individualism, a lack of a sense of community, and a lack of a sense of commitment. There is an overriding sense in which individuals are exclusively committed to themselves. The net result, of course, is an inevitable fragmenting of the society, the community of which you are a part. Sadly, this trend is seen in many aspects of the church of Jesus Christ too. There is an individualism about our spiritual experience. Not infrequently, we find that people want spirituality, but not in terms of the church of Jesus Christ, not in terms of the communion of saints.
Cyprian of Carthage, a famous early Christian martyr, once wrote, “No one can have God as his father who does not have the church for his mother.” In other words, to acknowledge God as our Father means joining a community of people who share that faith and whose historical roots lie firmly in the New Testament. While stressing the importance of a personal faith, the New Testament has no time for independence or individualism, whether the eccentric type that led some to become cave‑dwelling hermits in days of old or to a more modern kind that stresses self‑sufficiency.
What exactly does the phrase “communion of saints” mean? The word “communion” translates the Greek word koinonia. This is a very common word in the New Testament that means fellowship or partnership. It means to share together in a close relationship. In secular Greek it was used for a marriage, a business partnership, a community, or a nation bound together by common goals. Preeminently the word applies to friendship. Acts 2:42 uses this word to describe the intimate closeness of the early Christians who lived together, ate their meals together, and shared all things in common.
One of the most distinguishing characteristics of the early church was this vital communion, fellowship or Koinonia that they shared. We read of the early church in Acts, that they continued steadfastly in the Apostles’ doctrine and fellowship. We need very much in this day to grasp what they meant by this fellowship. If ever a generation needed it, ours does. Ours is a depersonalized world, an automated world where we must remember our area code, our zip code, our social security number—even our income tax is checked by a computer. In most colleges the students are known by a number; seldom is their name known or is there any concern with their lives. There is a great need for fellowship. We have failed to enter into the depth and meaning of the fellowship that Christ meant for us. This fellowship means "a sharing of life." It means that one life is flowing through all of those who live in Jesus Christ. The early church was very much aware that in some secret and mysterious way they had been made one. They were one temple, though living stones; they were one vine, though many branches; they were one family, though many children; there was one life that flowed through each one of their hearts. In this connection of life they discovered something that made their lives rich and meaningful. Fellowship means that we have to set aside the masks, that we have to make spending time with other believers a priority. Fellowship means that we talk about spiritual things, things that have eternal significance. Much of what we call fellowship today could be done with unbelievers because nothing spiritual takes place. We need to set aside our focus on American individuality and return to the Biblical understanding of communion and community. That’s what it means when we say, “I believe in the communion of the saints.”
Conclusion: Anne LaMott tells a wonderful story about a little seven-year girl who got lost one day. She was frantically running up and down the street when a police officer stopped to help her. He put her in his car and they drove around and around the neighborhood until she spotted something familiar. Suddenly she told the officer to stop. Confidently she said, "You can let me out here. This is my church, and I can always find my way home from here." My friends, when we are truly a community of saints, we can always find our way home to the Father and home to what God has called us to be.
The church is God’s plan for this age. Nations will fall, governments will fail, trends will end, buildings will crumble, political parties will lose their influence, but the gates of hell will not prevail against Jesus Christ’s church. As long as Grace Church remains a group of people devoted to Jesus Christ and submitted to the authority of the Bible, we will be a part of what God is up to for our generation. These four word pictures help us understand how central the church is to the Christian faith. A building, a body, a family and a bride. All four of these word pictures involve expansion and growth, whether it’s a building with new bricks being added as it storms the gates of hell, whether it’s a body with new parts transplanted as it lives as Jesus Christ’s physical presence in our world, whether it’s a family where we grow in our love for each other, or whether it’s a bride where we grow in holiness, as Jesus purifies us, removing every wrinkle and imperfection. Perhaps it’s this lack of understanding the vital importance of the church that has led our culture, despite its claim to religious belief, to be thoroughly secularized, confused, and lost. The world needs to the see the Church...may we be that for them here in Burlington!!