When is a church not a church?

There is nothing more toxic to faith than a hollowed-out institutional church

It looks like a church, but there’s nothing inside

The last few years have revealed and made clear a lot of things which were previously hidden or obscure. One of those things has been that almost everybody conceives of church in institutional terms. For many Christians, being a Christian is indistinguishable from being connected with the institution of the church and all its trappings. When people think ‘church’, they tend to think buildings, clerical collars, bishops, organs / worship bands, orders of service, notices, and on it goes. (The specifics may vary, but general principle holds.)

You can hardly blame them: People go to “church” on a Sunday, which is held in a “church” building, which is maybe part of the “Church” of England. The message is constantly reinforced that ‘this is church - within these walls, within these times, within this denomination’ - which implies that anything outside those bounds is not church. It’s been like this for so long - beyond any of our lifetimes - that I don’t think anyone has realised. I only noticed when we couldn’t go to church any more, during lockdown, and I started to think about what church really was.

Of course, thinking of church in institutional terms isn’t a bad thing in and of itself - it depends on the health of the institution. If the institution of the church is healthy, it doesn’t matter too much if someone connects ‘church’ with the institution. The UK church has enjoyed times of relative health in days gone by. However, the last few years have taught me that there are serious problems with the institution of the church - problems which extend across virtually all the established denominations. Today, it matters a great deal whether someone equates the institution with the church: now the institution is unhealthy, it’s producing sick Christians (or, worse, people who aren’t Christians at all but think they are).

The effect of seeing church institutionally

Let me start with a few examples of how this institutional view of church is impacting people.

A few weeks ago, my wife met a friend of ours who we hadn’t seen in a very long time. We first met in the Christian Union at university (she was in my Bible study group for a year). It’s fair to say that she’s changed quite a bit since then - she now has so-called ‘progressive’ views on issues such as LGBT. You might question how someone could be a Christian and hold views which in some ways are antithetical to the Bible, but it doesn’t seem to bother her as the church she goes to holds the same views. Her views are reinforced by the institutional church. In other words, rather than contradicting them, the (institutional) church is enabling her to entertain heterodox beliefs.

She’s not the only one I know who has followed the same pattern. I have several other friends who still call themselves Christian and go to church, but would differ sharply from the Bible on various issues.

Another example: when we left our old church last year, we started a house church. One of the things I’ve found is that many people struggle to get past it being in our home: it’s a church… but it’s meeting in your living room? Where are the bishops? Where are the clerical collars? Where are the pews, and other church furniture? I think a lot of people simply don’t see a service held in someone’s front room as ‘proper’ church. There are a few people who’ve come to a service here, but haven’t come back - preferring to go to a ‘normal’ church instead. The allure of traditional / institutional churches, with all the pomp and ceremony that comes with them, is hard to beat.

One final example: a few months ago, I was talking to another church leader who had done something similar to us - to leave the Church of England and start a house church. He was telling me about the importance of connecting with bigger organisations (e.g AMiE), and said that until we did we should not even call ourselves a church. My impression of our conversation is that he couldn’t see that what we were doing could really be church without formal structures and policies in place.

Church in the Bible

One of the phrases which I’ve been using a lot lately is, “when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” (It’s a useful phrase!) It seems to me that this is exactly what has happened with church. Christians across the Western world have become so acclimatised to church being an institution that we can’t conceptualise how it could be different. It’s like we’ve all become so blinkered that we just accept the way things are as the ‘right’ way without question. I’ve found that explaining the problem is a bit like explaining what water is to a fish. Christians might say things like “church is a family” or “church is the people, not the building” - but those are just phrases which get trotted out occasionally because we know they’re the right answer. Crucially, we don’t really know what it means for the church to be the people and be family because we’ve never experienced it.

This is why we need to go back to the Bible - back to first principles - and think carefully about what church is and what church is not. Obviously a comprehensive Biblical study of ‘the church’ is well beyond the scope of this post, but I’d like to offer a few brief thoughts as to where we should begin.

Firstly, in the New Testament the church is the people. That’s why I find it immensely frustrating when people say things like, “you can be a Christian without going to church.” The truth is that you CAN’T be a Christian without being part of the church. If you are united to Christ by faith, you are united to other believers too. This is a nonnegotiable - it’s fundamental to who we are as Christians. I talked more about this recently on Understand the Bible, please do watch the video if you’re interested. (And this one, if you’re really interested!)

Secondly - and this is simply a logical extension of the first point - in the Bible, the church is never a building or an event. The word ‘church’ in the New Testament refers to one of three things:

• The universal church - e.g. the body of Christ (Ephesians 1:22-23)

• A local expression of the universal church - e.g. the church in Philippi (Philippians 1:1)

• A specific church, e.g. the church that meets in the house of Nympha (Colossians 4:15)

When the church meets, the church ‘comes together’ (1 Corinthians 11:18). It is beyond doubt that the church is the people - those united to Christ by faith. So, the church might ‘come together’ to worship, but church is not the time of their gathering or the building they meet in!

Thirdly, there is only one church. As the Nicene Creed puts it, “we believe in one holy, catholic and apostolic church”. There are no denominations in the Bible - there are only local churches which are part of the one true church. Something which I think must grieve God greatly is the way that Christians see their tribal / denominational unity as more important than spiritual unity with fellow Christians.

Fourthly, the church must submit to the Word of God. It is imperative that the church of God submits itself to the Word of God. This was hugely important at the time of the reformation (more on that in a moment). You can see how highly the reformers placed the Bible in the church in this representative example - from the Church of England’s 39 Articles of Religion:

XIX. Of the Church

The visible Church of Christ is a congregation of faithful men, in the which the pure Word of God is preached [my emphasis], and the Sacraments be duly- ministered according to Christ's ordinance in all those things that of necessity are requisite to the same.

XX. Of the Authority of the Church

The Church hath power to decree Rites or Ceremonies, and authority in Controversies of Faith: And yet it is not lawful for the Church to ordain any thing that is contrary to God's Word written [my emphasis], neither may it so expound one place of Scripture, that it be repugnant to another.

There’s far more to say, but hopefully that is enough for us to move on to how the institutional church relates to this.

Is the institutional church the true church?

The 16th century reformers made a distinction between the visible and the invisible church. (Notice the word “visible” in Cranmer’s words in Article XIX, quoted above). The invisible church is the universal, eternal church we’ve just been talking about; the visible church is the earthly expression of it. This allows for the fact that there is only one true church which all those in Christ are part of, but earthly churches - because they are made up of sinners - are always going to be a mixed bag of truth and error.

The reformers needed to come up with this distinction because of what was happening with the medieval Catholic church. They saw the corruption in the church, and in particular they saw the way that the church would not submit to the Word of God. And yet, it was still called a ‘church’, and even claimed itself to be the church. The reformers were forced to reckon with the fact that not everything which calls itself a church is the church - hence this distinction between the visible and invisible church.

I think we are in a similar position today to the reformers. The church is the place where God should be honoured above everything, and his Word should be obeyed without question. Please don’t misunderstand me - I am not trying to make the case for sinless perfectionism! We all fall short every day, but the church should be aiming to put God first in everything, in the power of the Holy Spirit. However, I believe the church as an institution has seriously dropped the ball and lost sight of what’s really important.

We can debate how serious or widespread the problem is, and I appreciate there may be a range of views on that. Personally, I think it speaks volumes that pretty much every church up and down the country closed its doors during lockdown - and still hasn’t owned up to doing anything wrong. (It’s not just the Church of England: John Stevens, head of the FIEC - a conservative evangelical denomination - was one of the biggest cheerleaders for church obeying government rules). Almost every church denomination has bought into the safeguarding heresy. Many denominations are actively debating same-sex marriage.

Either way, going back to the individual examples I gave above, what happens when the institution of the church goes bad?

What’s the problem when the institutional church goes bad?

When the institutional church falls away from God and the gospel, you are left with something very dangerous: something which might look like a church on the outside, but is far from God on the inside. The reason this is dangerous is because someone - especially a new believer - might be tempted to join the institutional church, but find that it has a toxic and corrosive influence on their faith rather than nurturing it.

When people think that church is about doing “church stuff” - going to church, singing hymns, and so on - rather than about the power and presence of the Holy Spirit - then it’s possible to do that entirely without God. In a sense, a hollowed-out institutional church is the worst possible thing you could have: rather than drawing people to God, it actually isolates people from God by soothing their consciences without requiring anything of them. (See Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s words about cheap grace).

I believe there is nothing more toxic to people’s faith than an empty institutional church.

This is why God came down so hard in the Old Testament on ‘empty’ Israelite religion, where they were busy doing all the things God had asked them to do on the outside but didn’t love him on the inside. As the Lord says through the prophet Isaiah:

“These people come near to me with their mouth
    and honour me with their lips,
    but their hearts are far from me.

Isaiah 29:13

It’s possible to do lots of churchy things but without having any love for the Lord whatsoever - in fact, to do it all while harbouring hatred in your heart. It is sobering that the group in the gospels who considered themselves the most godly - the Pharisees - were the ones who conspired to murder the Lord Jesus.

Outward religious devotion can be a cover for all sorts of sin and wickedness inside. To quote one more example, this time from the prophet Jeremiah:

This is what the Lord Almighty, the God of Israel, says: Reform your ways and your actions, and I will let you live in this place. ⁴ Do not trust in deceptive words and say, “This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord!” ⁵ If you really change your ways and your actions and deal with each other justly, ⁶ if you do not oppress the foreigner, the fatherless or the widow and do not shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not follow other gods to your own harm, ⁷ then I will let you live in this place, in the land I gave your ancestors for ever and ever. ⁸ But look, you are trusting in deceptive words that are worthless.

Jeremiah 7:3-8

Jeremiah accuses the Israelites of using the temple and their religious devotion (as they saw it) to mask their sin and immorality. The Lord says, this is meaningless unless they reform their ways and deal justly with one another. When they worshipped and offered sacrifices in the temple, they were merely going through the motions. It helped to assuage their own conscience, but the Lord was not deceived.

I believe this is the exact problem we face today. The institutional church has become so corrupt, and yet people are still drawn to it because we can’t get past seeing church as an institution. However, the hollowed-out institutions are giving people a false sense of security, making them believe that God’s a nice sort of chap who will affirm and accept us no matter what. Rather than building people up in faith, this hollowed-out institutional church is going to destroy people.

The tragedy is, this is not an academic issue but is affecting real people right now. Regular churchgoers who may have once been strong in their faith are now weak and struggling. In my own experience, I’ve seen people who I used to respect as mature Christians become hollowed out and their faith wane. Because their loyalty to the institution came before their loyalty to Christ, their faith has suffered and perhaps even been extinguished. It’s desperately sad to witness.

What can we do?

I’d like to finish this on a positive note, so let me end by focussing on three things that we need to remember to make a difference.

Firstly, remember that our loyalty is to Christ, not an institution. Too many people have suffered because they have put their loyalty to the institution above their loyalty to Christ. We must remember that all humans and human institutions are capable of being flawed, and being truly loyal means not going along with their errors and keeping ourselves pure from them. We need to keep ourselves “from being polluted by the world” (James 1:27) - including where the world has seeped into the church. Judge everything according to the Word of God, not according to what your church says!

Secondly, remember that the purity of the church is our (collective) responsibility. It is not the responsibility solely of pastors and church leaders. When Paul wrote to the church in Corinth, he was not writing to church leaders - he was writing to the whole church. This is what he says to them all:

What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside? God will judge those outside. “Expel the wicked person from among you.”

1 Corinthians 5:12-13

Church purity is the responsibility of the church - not just pastors. If you see something wrong in the church, it is YOUR job to do something about it. If the church is allowing sin and immoral behaviour to go unchallenged, it is a serious issue. Do not rest content with it.

One of the things I regret about the last few years for myself is not speaking up when I had the chance. When people were acting in ways that were wrong, e.g. bullying and manipulative, I should have taken the chance to speak up. It’s not always possible, and it’s certainly never easy, but God cares about the purity of his church far more than we do. We need to be holding people to account.

Finally, remember that leaving is a Biblical option. As Paul says in his second letter to the Corinthians:

Do not be yoked together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness?…

Therefore,

“Come out from them
    and be separate,
says the Lord.
Touch no unclean thing,
    and I will receive you.”

2 Corinthians 6:14, 17

If you come to believe that your church is in error, and is set against the Word of God and will not be corrected, then the time has come to leave. One Church of England bishop used to say, “the only heresy is schism”. This is a fairly common attitude in the Church of England - that unity must be preserved at all costs. But unity means nothing if it comes at the price of truth.

How do we know when it’s time to stay and time to leave? That’s a big question which I think will have to wait for now as I’ve gone on for long enough already! Stay tuned and maybe I’ll deal with that question next week…