In my travels, I often run across literature with titles like “The marks of a true church” or “How to recognize a New Testament church.” I won’t claim to have read all of them, but the ones I’ve seen fail to do what they claim to do. That is, they don’t focus on the things the Bible says about what makes a church a true church.
Yesterday we talked about online behavior and spiritual realities, how our behavior on the Internet affects us spiritually. That doesn’t just go for what we do on the computer; I think we need to see that how we treat others affects who we are, as well as making a statement about who we are.
The big “mark” to look for, of course, is love. That can sound trite, yet the Bible repeatedly identifies that as the most important thing. If what we’re doing doesn’t lead us to love, doesn’t produce love, doesn’t reflect love, then what we’re doing isn’t godly. It’s that simple. Again, I know that Jesus got angry and Paul wrote some harsh things, but none of that gives us license to proceed in a way that doesn’t reflect God’s nature. God is love.
We also need to be looking for the rest of the fruit of the Spirit. A Spirit-led life will produce the things listed in Galatians 5:22-23. And we will pursue those things, as a church, or we will be a carnal, worldly church.
None of that impedes our obeying God and seeking to do His will. But if in that pursuit of God pleasing we quit following the Spirit, we will never achieve our goal. You can’t “do the right things” without the fruit of the Spirit.
That’s why we need the big picture. That’s why we need theology. Focusing merely on behaviors won’t get us there. We need to look at the spiritual realities behind the behaviors.
Amen! Seems that whenever I read one of those articles, it’s always “This is how you will know the true church….” and then lists the 5 acts of worship, no central earthly headquarter, Christ is the only head, autonomous, etc. Not saying that those things aren’t important, but as you said, there is so much more to it. Those are just the ones that it’s easy to put a checkmark beside and then go about our regular, everyday lives. Not to make a blanket statement, but it has struck me how there are those in “true” churches that look at it just like that, there is a “true church” and then there is everyday life. Being part of the “true church” is an active experience to be lived every single day, not just by counting off the to do list on Sunday.
The problem with all of those tracts on how to identify the “true church” is that they relegate the church to a third-person entity constructed out of selective extrapolations from scripture (extrapolations often made with little regard to the canonical, literary, historical, and theological context) and then expect the second-person (the believers) to fit into that box called the “true church.” With such an approach to ecclesiology, it is little wonder why certain people can exhibit little love, little fruit of the Spirit and still self-righteously be assured they are what God has called the church to be.
…Of course, at some point some people begin to realize that the box, the third-person entity, is not only not the church but is also skewed in various ways and so they no longer are content to quietly remain in the box. That is what we see taking place at the present time.