Why the World Still Needs the Church

The critics are right; the church is broken. Nowhere is this reality more apparent than in disputes about what the Bride of Christ actually is. An institution or a relationship? A means for spirituality or a place for religion?

For the most part, such debates prove futile, as parties on all sides tend to default to definitions of “church” and “Christianity” befitting their own agendas: traditionalist or free-form, liberal or fundamentalist, narrow or universalist. Too often, the real-world result is a husk of a church, watered down to the faithful and stripped of its potential import to the faithless.

There are the rigidly self-assured churches, so exclusive in their code that everyone outside becomes a heretic. And there are the loosey-goosey churches for whom heresy becomes nearly impossible, as long as one’s intentions are good. The church’s healthy, balanced diet battles against an overly starchy, flavorless offering on one end of the table and too much candy on the other. But where’s the meat of gospel preaching, heartfelt worship, and salvations?

Just as dry legalism and pure intellectualism quench the Spirit, sugar-coated axioms give a reliable, if manufactured, Sunday high, but produce little in the way of genuine life-change. For far too many inside the church, it has become either an entirely academic or political affair, or mere feel-good entertainment, a rock show with a twenty-minute TED Talk tagged on. And for too many outside the church, the ecclesia has turned into either a country club of nationalist Pharisees or, perhaps worse, a mirror image of the secular narrative, plus praise music.

The latter reality is particularly frightening. If the church is no different than the world, and the Christian no different than anyone else, we really have been duped. And the truth is, you can find “church stuff” plenty of other places than church. I’m talking about the things so many say draw them through church doors in the first place—“community,” a place to commit oneself, an outlet for practicing hospitality and generosity, morality lessons, a means of introducing meaning in your life, and, even, authority. The church is not unique in these projects. To find them, we need look no further than the Rotary Club, online gaming communities, political affiliations, or any other of the pantheon of religions available.

And on the flip-side, ample churches don’t actually provide, or only rarely, the practices that are meant to be unique to it—the Lord’s Supper, baptism, psalms and hymns, faithful gospel teaching, corporate prayer, and corporate confession.

So with a church declining in popularity and significance, tempted to adopt a worldly air and disown its heavenly one, the question is fair: What use is the church anymore, not only to itself, but to the world?

Surely, it is only when the church operates in service and worship of Christ and in step with the Holy Spirit that the world can receive its benefits. Only when it provides the “solid food” of a transformative, controversial gospel, administered in the sacraments and testified to in actual truth claims that Christians, and the wider world, can taste its fruit.

For all the shortcomings of its parts, the church, as it has for the last two millennia, continues to occupy a unique and vital place. It’s vital not only in the life of the Christian, but in the world submerged by the tides of secularism and syncretism. Here are three reasons why.

Proclaiming Truth

First, the biblical church, is a last bastion of solid truth. The Christian claim that there exists a knowable, livable, eternal and unchanging truth is not merely a finger-wag at postmodernism and cultural relativism. It’s a flag staked in the ground: humble but unflappable, kind but uncompromising, adaptable but never to the point of sacrificing the sacred facts of orthodox Christianity.

“A healthy church will look at norms with a critical eye, holding them up to the light of Christ, which involves deep reading of Scripture and deep engagement with biblical ethics,” Marilyn McEntyre wrote in Comment. “It will lift you out of your cultural landscape enough to take a long, even transcendent, view of it.”

It’s from this immovable point, the foci of the Christian life found in that beacon-like “light of Christ,” that all else becomes, if not clear, at least open to be weighed, measured, and juxtaposed. Sacred or secular, a useful cartography of our temporal and spiritual moment, and all eternity, is only possible when there is at least one point of reference. Done well, the church offers just that.

In an era rife with half-truths, sometimes-truths, and “personal truths,” the message of the church in the person of Jesus is frustratingly sturdy. Who else can say the same? Politics moves with the tides of popular opinion. Popular opinion sways with the winds of tweets and hashtags. Contrived or not, “fake news” is ever-harder to distinguish from the less-biased sort. The messages of individualism and consumerism are pervasive and overwhelming, like a landscape made of quicksand. Science still maintains the veracity of verifiability, but it doesn’t answer the heart-questions, even when they are disguised as head-questions.

In the end, because it is so flimsy, the secular narrative falls flat. And quickly. By and large, it has no boundaries. What signposts there are do little to mark where you are as much as how far you’ve come along the highway of philosophical, metaphysical, cultural, and technological progress.

The Christian message, by contrast, has stated borders. Critics call them oppressive dogma. Believers call them sacred, renewed knowledge and freedom in the good love and will of Christ.

History and human fallenness prove that ultimate truths can still be rejected, but even so, their very existence is important for devotees and critics alike. Whether the “nones” or the merely spiritually woke crowd respect the Christian narrative is a matter of premier importance, not least of all if they are to jive with the spirited doctrines of cultural tolerance—to say nothing of salvation itself. But even if they have no reverence for Christian Truth with a capital T, they at least have a landmark by which to judge distances and discrepancies.

The anchor of the church’s chief message is just that—a holding point. A written, spoken, and lived Way by which a topsy-turvy, trampoline world can judge the shakiness of nearly all the other worldviews on offer. Only gospel Christians will call the good news True North, but at least the rest of the world gains a compass point. By it, they find a fixed counterweight by which to weigh their astrologies, moving targets, and feel-good faiths.

Navigating Brokenness

Second, the church offers a unique kind of dancing lessons for maneuvering a broken world. The secular world can learn much from the church universal whether it buys into the gospel or not. In addition to the simple claim that universal, eternal Truth exists, the church can model and witness to the world disciplines and heart patterns seldom or never seen elsewhere.

The church can practice the power of forgiveness when no one else will. It can testify to the reality of redemption and reconciliation when segregation and submission would be easier. It can hold to an upside-down perspective on suffering, mourning with those who mourn and then inviting Christ to turn that mourning into dancing. It can practice self-denial in a time when the very word is cultural blasphemy. And it can live out the resilient might of resurrection hope, praying when the world sleeps, praising when the world sighs, and resting in the blessed assurance of a sovereign God.

All of this portends a deeper ideal that is, or should be, revered in the church, but causes confusion and panic in the culture. It’s the idea that we can find peace, comfort, and even satisfaction in a healthy dose of mystery.

Many secularists will hear of Christian mystery and call it paradox or cognitive dissonance. No secular institutions are as tolerant—even expectant—of mystery as the church.

This is not some schismatic, faith-and-science type blending of seemingly discordant realities, as though the essential mysteries of faith could be boiled down to determining the ideal proportions of theological risk and solid, reproducible fact. This is the mystery of the supernatural stepping into the natural, of the divine waltz on the dancefloor of a quaking creation. Mysteries of practice, like those mentioned above. And mysteries of mind and heart: Jesus as fully God and fully man. The individual persons and unified essence of the Trinity. Utter mercy and utter justice. Lion and lamb. Sinner and saint. Divine sovereignty and human decision. Now but not yet.

The church can provide a means of contentment, even delight, in mystery. And it can give a window into the mysteries of God and time without end. Kevin DeYoung writes, “What we do on Sunday is a foretaste of the ceaseless worship that will be ours in heaven and a reflection of the glorious worship taking place presently around the throne.”

Truly, whatever good we do and say and believe and hope for on Sunday mornings—or whenever the church is the church—heralds not only a present with God, but an eternity with him. Though now we see through a glass darkly, caught up in the mystery of life and faith, the church as the Bride of Christ and a forerunner of the kingdom on earth can draw us closer, word by word and prayer by prayer, toward the true face of God. The church helps the world to live with mystery. It also points to a time and a Way by which mysteries will be fully known.

Giving Grace

Third, and simplest of all, the church is a dispenser of grace when everyone else is fresh out. The Christian has already received the unmerited favor of God. It is the greatest gift of our Father, that he would wash away our sins with the blood of his Son, the perfect sacrifice. Such grace is unspeakable, unimaginable, unrelenting. It is the most unique feature of the individual Christian’s story and the story of the church.

The secular world, on the other hand, is perpetually trying to save itself, concocting bigger and better means of covering up what’s wrong, not necessarily with what’s better, but at least with an alternative, the wrongness of which is harder to identify. It is human hubris and, to be fair, ingenuity and ambition, that keeps our species ever searching for a way to achieve its own salvation.

And whether things improve or dissolve, whether the arc of history really bends toward justice or just bends, self-propelled salvation remains elusive. As it will always be.

But the church can demonstrate a truer way. After all, the church is the recipient of cosmos-shaking, undeserved blessing by being called heirs with Christ and sons and daughters of God. The church knows it must forgive seventy times seven. It knows the distance between East and West, between heaven and hell, and therefore how far separate the elect are from their sins. It knows the elements of grace and the practice of it. And most of all it knows personified grace in the person of Jesus Christ.

And for such reasons, the church is essential to the secular world as a model of life lived in grace, by grace, and administering grace. The world works so hard for what it can’t gain. The church must show a different way. The only true Way. Because it can. And because no one else will.

In the expanding vineyard of secularism, the church can and must still bear good fruit. From that fruit—proclaiming durable truths, delighting in the mysteries of life and faith, dispensing grace—a better way will still be visible to a lost world.