If I have a personal relationship with God, why do I need to attend a local church? After all, some of the best Bible teaching and worship is live-streamed on Sundays from churches all over the world. Why can’t I just stay at home and enjoy these online ministries?
From earliest times Christians have maintained that God does not save people from sin without also saving them into the local church. For example, Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage (248-258) famously said, “outside the church there is no salvation” (Letters 73.21). D.L. Moody, the American evangelist and author declared, “Church attendance is as vital to a disciple as a transfusion of rich, healthy blood to a sick man.” And more recently John Stott wrote, “I hope none of my readers is that grotesque anomaly, an unchurched Christian. The New Testament knows nothing of such a person. For the church lies at the very centre of the eternal purpose of God” (The Living Church).
But what lies behind their convictions? Simply put, the Bible.
God’s Word in the New Testament pictures the Christian life as a community project. We are bound together. We are variously described as the flock of Christ (Luke 12:32), the bride of Christ (Ephesians 5), and God’s temple (1 Corinthians 3:16).
But perhaps the most striking image of all is of Christians as the body of Christ. It is an image that pictures not only our dependence on the head, the Lord Jesus, but also our dependence on one another. This is the argument that the apostle Paul makes in 1 Corinthians 12:12 where he says, “The body is a unit, though it is made up of many parts; and though all its parts are many, they form one body. So it is with Christ.”
Elsewhere Paul uses the language of a man and women being joined together in marriage to describe Christians in a local church being “joined together” to become a holy temple in the Lord (Ephesians 2:21). This understanding of the local church is what lies behind nearly 60 “one another” statements in the New Testament. For example, believers are to “love one another” (Romans 13:8), “encourage one another” (1 Thessalonians 4:18), “pray for one another” (James 5:16). And it’s only in the local church where believers can experience true “fellowship with one another” (1 John 1:7).
But above all, Christians gather together in the local church to be taught God’s Word in community. Hebrews 10:25 commands us not to give up meeting together, which in the context refers to the formal gathering of God’s people for Bible teaching and worship.
The point is that when we meet at church to sit under God’s Word, I know what you have heard and you know what I have heard. There is a loving accountability between us for the way that we respond that is missing when I listen to sermon downloads by myself at home. Sitting under God’s Word together and responding in worship together is God’s life-support system for every believer.
You can’t have a groom without a bride. Christ is our bridegroom. He loves His bride, the local church. And so must we. Not in theory or from a distance. But in person, in the flesh, every week for our good and for God’s glory.
