When one talks about the church what is at stake is the way in which the Christian life is organized. I believe that the Bible teaches us that believers should be united to the visible community of the redeemed meeting for worship, instruction, and fellowship in an organized, disciplined, way. If this is wrong, then millions of dollars and millions of hours and lives are being sadly misspent.
Certainly there are strong individual elements to the Christian faith. No one else can believe for you. God does speak to individual hearts in His Word. He gives new life to individuals. The Bible, however, does not stop there: “it deals with man, not only as a solitary unit in his relation to God, but also as a member of a spiritual society, gathered together in the name of Jesus…not an accidental or voluntary union which has grown up of itself: it is a union designed beforehand, appointed from the beginning by God, and plainly contemplated and required in every page of the New Testament Scriptures.”
One of the strongest themes in Patristic and Medieval theology was the importance of the Church as a visible institution. The original evangelicals, i.e. the confessional Protestants of the sixteenth-century Reformation, were “a people of the book” and also a people of the church. American evangelicalism, however, has a mixed record on the doctrine of the Church. Though the church was still relatively important for most segments of evangelicalism through most of the 19th century, its importance was slipping. By the middle of this century, evangelicalism had virtually lost any notion of the church as a visible institution. It has not always been so. For the better part of Christian history, the doctrine of the Church has been considered a central part of the Christian confession.
The Apostles’ Creed says: “I believe the holy catholic church, the communion of the saints, the forgiveness of sins….”
Remember that these clauses in the Creed come under the heading of the Holy Spirit. In the conception of the Creed, the “holy catholic” church is an assembly under the Holy Spirit. A key to a balanced ecclesiology is to keep together the “one,” that is the “church universal” (holy catholic church) and the “many,” that is, church particular or communion of the saints. A well-known sixteenth-century Protestant catechism describes the holy catholicity of the church thus:
That, out of the whole human race, from the beginning to the end of the world, the Son of God, by His Spirit and Word, gathers, defends and preserves for Himself to everlasting life a chosen communion in the unity of the true faith; and that I am and forever shall remain a living member of the same.
It handles the particular under “communion:”
What do you understand by the ‘communion of saints’?
First, that believers, one and all, as members of the Lord Jesus Christ, are partakers with Him in all His treasures and gifts; secondly, that each one must feel himself bound to use his gifts readily and cheerfully for the advantage and welfare of other members.
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