What Is the Holy Christian Church?
When is a church not a church? When it’s been converted into a bar, restaurant, house, or skate park. When is the church not a church? When Christians worship in a school gymnasium or the dining room of a member’s home. What is the church? That is the question. It is more than what we do on Sunday mornings in this room or in this building. “The Church” is even more than any one activity we do together.
The Apostle Paul describes The Church this way:
You are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people and also members of his household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone.[1]
According to Paul, what is The Church? The Church is God’s people. What does Paul compare God’s people to? A household, and even the component parts of a literal building. So, even though this building is not in the strictest sense “The Church”, there are things we can learn about The Church when we look at a building.
According to Paul, what are two things that are essential for any building to have? A foundation and a cornerstone.
What’s the job of a foundation? It’s to hold everything up, to give the rest of the building a solid base to stand on. What would happen if you didn’t have a (good) foundation? It’d be a lot harder to build your building and the final product would be a whole lot less stable.
How about a cornerstone? Do you know what the job of a cornerstone is? It’s to determine the direction of the rest of the building. So, if your cornerstone has an angle like this, that’s the angle the walls are going to take. Or if it’s a wider angle like that, then that’s where the walls are going to go.
According to Paul, what is the foundation of the church? The apostles and prophets, which is ultimately just a shorthand for what the apostles and prophets wrote, which is the Bible. So, the Bible is the foundation of the church. How about the cornerstone? Who is the cornerstone of the church? Christ Jesus. Jesus determines the direction of our faith and life.
So, all this is to say that The Church consists of everyone everywhere who stands on the foundation of God’s Word and believes in Jesus as their Lord and Saviour.
But here’s the thing, why does that matter? Why do we care what The Church is? Because we know how many churches there are. Does anyone want to guess how many Christian churches there are in St. Albert? I don’t know the exact number, but I do know that there are at least 24 (and I suspect that there are several more). So, which one is The Church?
I want to be clear about this: it would not only be presumptuous and prideful, it would be flat-out wrong for me to say that St. Peter is The Church in St. Albert. If The Church is everyone everywhere who believes in Jesus, then it is going to be made up of members of many, if not all, of the Christian congregations in St. Albert. Because regardless of whatever differences legitimately divide us, to my knowledge anyway, every Christian church in St. Albert still preaches Jesus.
And so there’s this important truth that every Christian should understand: congregations are no more The Church than the buildings they worship in, because there is a difference between what we sometimes call the visible church and the invisible church.
The invisible church is everyone everywhere who believes in Jesus. Why do you suppose we call that the “invisible” church? Because I can’t see it. I can’t walk down the street and say, “Christian. Not a Christian. Christian. Not a Christian.” I can’t look into a person’s heart and see what they believe.
What I can see, on the other hand, is whose car is parked outside and who walks around town wearing St. Peter apparel. If you were to go to another church on a Sunday morning, you’d be able to see who’s there. There are people who visibly practice their Christian faith. I can see what they say and do. And generally, as humans, we like to congregate with likeminded believers in congregations. So, congregations – and even the larger church bodies they belong to – are the visible church.
Again, there are at least 24 visible churches in St. Albert alone. How can you know where you belong? In the vast panoply of Christianity where’s your place?
Let me tell you about Berea. The Apostle Paul went there on one of his mission trips, and described the people there as being “of more noble character” than some of the other people he preached to. Here’s his rationale: For they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true.[2]
What was it about those Bereans that led Paul to believe that they had such noble character? It was their eagerness to receive the message and their diligence in fact-checking that message against God’s Word.
We live in an information age. We can’t help but consume it. It’s around us all the time. But you know as well as I do that half the stuff you see online is fake. There are AI images that look real but aren’t. There are stories that are shared purposely to mislead you. Sadly, there are even preachers who don’t speak the truth either – whether because they want to take advantage of you, or because they don’t know better, or most likely because of what Paul said to Timothy:
For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths.[3]
What led these people to turn away from the truth and to turn aside to myths? They only wanted to hear what they wanted to hear. They didn’t care about the truth anymore; they only cared about what sounded good to them.
But before you say to yourself, “Yeah, Pastor, go get ‘em! Nail those heretics – those hypocrites – to the wall!” I want you to hear what Paul says next:
But you, keep your head in all situations...[4]
Why does Paul even mention these other people to Timothy? As a warning to Timothy not to do the same, but to stay true to God’s Word. And that’s a temptation that you face far more often than anyone could possibly realize – whether it’s the “controversial” or “antiquated” doctrines of the Bible regarding sex and sexuality or the roles of men and women – or even if it’s that little voice you hear in your head every time you sin. “It’s not a big deal.” “You’re not hurting anyone.” “Who will even know?” “Surely God didn’t mean this when he said not to do that.”
We compromise the truth of God’s Word all the time when we justify our behaviour instead of confessing our sin. We turn away from the truth every time that we seek validation from anyone other than God for the decisions we’ve made (because we’d rather hold on to those decisions and their results whether God wants us to or not).
The whole idea of The Church is so vital for you to understand not so you can pound your chest when you talk about your congregation, but so that you can be confident that you’ve built your faith and hope on the proper foundation. Jesus talked about this in Matthew 7:
Everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock.[5]
But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash.”[6]
What do both the wise and the foolish builders have in common? The houses are the same and the external circumstances are the same. So what was the key difference? The foundation. One was built on the rock, the other on the sand.
Jesus doesn’t say that the quality of the construction of the one was better than the other. He doesn’t say that the first builder tried harder than the other or used better materials than the other or cut fewer corners than the other.
In other words, it’s not about whether you try hard enough or succeed often enough or fail less than anyone else. All that matters is what your foundation is. So that if your foundation is God’s Word and your cornerstone is Christ, then even when you sin, you can withstand any storm in your life or in your soul, because from God’s Word you hear about Christ’s sacrifice to forgive your sin.
That’s why in the Apostles’ Creed we refer to The Church as “the holy, Christian church” – not because we are holy or perfect or better than anyone else, but because of what Christ has done for you:
Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless.[7]
Why can we call “the holy Christian church” “holy”? Because that’s what Christ has made you. He cleansed you through the waters of baptism. He proclaims his forgiveness won for you when he sacrificed himself on the cross for you every time the Word is preached to you. He exchanges your guilt for his grace so that you have a leg to stand on, a refuge in every storm of life, a foundation to be built upon.
In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.[8]
This might be unfair to ask, but which two words (repeated twice, by the way) are the most important words in these two sentences? In him. In Christ. We’d be nothing without him. There’d be no reason to gather here every week, no reason to host Kids Bible Camps, to pool our resources in an annual budget, let alone bother with worship or prayer.
But in him, we are all continuing to be joined together by him, not into a social club or even a foster family, but to become a holy temple, a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit. And that’s exactly what he does. It was the promise that Jesus made, and the reality made ours by the Holy Spirit.
“Where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them.”[9]
That’s why these photos are The Church, because it was Jesus that brought these people together – for a Bible camp or a campfire – and it is Jesus who is with you every time you gather together in his name.
So, what is The Church? It is everyone everywhere who believes in Jesus. More importantly, it is you who were washed, who were sanctified, who were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of God.
This is most certainly true. Amen.
[1] Ephesians 2:19,20
[2] Acts 17:11
[3] 2 Timothy 4:3,4
[4] 2 Timothy 4:5
[5] Matthew 7:24,25
[6] Matthew 7:26,27
[7] Ephesians 5:25-27
[8] Ephesians 2:21,22
[9] Matthew 18: