The Deception of ‘I Love Jesus But Not The Church’

There is this sentiment among some today that you can love Jesus without loving the church.  You hear it all the time.  “I’m done with church.  I don’t really need to go to church…my relationship with God is personal.  I just don’t believe in organized church.”  There are those who would like for us to believe that you can separate Jesus from “church”.  They may separate Jesus from church in their own head, but they can’t use the Bible to do it.  Jesus loves the church.  He commanded husbands to love their wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself for her (Ephesians 5:25).  I still remember the day that Jill and I got married.  I remember the way she looked when she walked down the aisle. I still cannot believe that I get to share my life with someone so wonderful.  She is my bride.  I would never allow someone to tear her down.  She is too valuable to me.  Hold on to this picture, because it is important to understand Jesus and His relationship with the Church.

The Church in the Bible is called the Bride of Christ.  When we try to separate Christ from the Church, it’s like experiencing a situation in which someone tells me that they love me, they just don’t like my wife.  People that claim to love Christ and not His church have a theological problem.  It’s like trying to separate wet from water.  You cannot accept one without the other because they are one.

I completely understand why some people are bailing on church.  I even know of people who used to lead in the church who have stopped attending.  I get it.  The church is far from perfect.  Life is complex.  But as “trendy” as the idea of writing off the church may be, it’s a huge mistake that leads nowhere constructive.  I’ve heard all the rational about the church “not being confined to a building – that all spaces are sacred and therefore, filled with divine presence.”  The well-worn argument that the church is not a building, contains just enough truth to lure the lazy to their inevitable conclusion:

Church attendance is optional.  Serving the brethren, again, is optional.  Encouraging the brethren with your presence?  Still optional.  Feeling guilty about not wanting to go to church?  Don’t worry about it; that’s the fault of organized religion.  Then they will follow up by reciting a recent article they read.  It usually is about: “The Real Reason Evangelicals and Millennials are Leaving the Church”.  The writers of such articles pander to what hurting people want to hear.  So long as you subject the Scriptures to tokenism and appeal to sentimentalism, people will eat it up.  Soon enough they’ll be in the woods on Sunday morning celebrating “communion” with Coca Cola and cookies because God is “cool with it”.

I find it puzzling that Christians who claim they have read the Bible still debate church attendance.  I’m not denying that some churches simply aren’t churches per the definition of Scripture; what I am speaking against is the underwhelming opinion that you can somehow be part of the universal church and reject the local church, or that the local church is made up of you and your family on a Sunday morning as you lay in bed and fail the assembling of yourselves together as Paul commanded us in (Hebrews 10:24-25).   And let us consider one another in order to stir up love and good works, not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as is the manner of some, but exhorting one another, and so much the more as you see the Day approaching.  Paul said we are to consider one another, to encourage one another by our coming together.  That’s the problem, people who abandon the church are not considering others, they are simply thinking of themselves.

The big Question?  Can you be a Believer and not participate in a church?  I’m not talking about those who due to medical reasons can’t participate.  Can you really be a healthy believer and not want to be part of a congregation.  Yes, if you can have a healthy marriage and not be connected to your spouse, if you can be a honey bee and not be part of a hive (not gonna make a lot of honey that way), if you can be a solider without being part of an army (remember Rambo was just a movie), if you can be a football player and not be part of a team, then sure, you can be a believer and not participate in church.  To make a statement like, “I don’t attend church because I don’t believe in organized church” is like saying I believe in baseball, I just don’t believe in organized baseball?  You’re not a baseball team by yourself, nor are you the church by yourself.  You are a part of the church, a member of the body.  What is the church?  It is an assembly.  It is a people, but not a person.  A person is part of the church, like a finger is part of the body.  The finger is not a body by itself, nor is a person a church by themselves.

I have never met someone who got saved and immediately didn’t go to church.  They all immediately became part of a church, even those who were not saved in a church setting became part of a local church.  It was only after something happened that they quit or left the church, they were hurt, or they sinned, had some failure or trouble with someone in the church.  Acts 2:47 tells us the Lord added to the church daily those who were being saved.  Those that were saved were added to the church by the Lord, not the preacher.  This thought of being saved apart from the church is a foreign concept in the Bible.  The New Testament is written with the understanding that those who were being saved are brought into the church at the same time.

The reality is that the entire New Testament presupposes you are going to be part of an organized, local church.  People wish to delve into semantics and separate the location from the body of believers, but that isn’t the point of defining what the local church is.  Yes, the building could be demolished overnight and the church would still exist – however, that local church still meets in time and space.  That local church still has a designated structure made up of elders, teachers, deacons, evangelists, etc., for the edification of the whole man until the saints reach unity in the faith and the knowledge of Christ (Eph. 4:11-16).  The church is made up of living stones that are being built up as a spiritual house into a holy priesthood for service to Christ (1 Pt. 2:5) and they are members of one another (Rom. 12:5; Eph. 4:25, 1 Cor. 12:12-27), and are present within a local community.

The church was not a human invention.  Half-reading the New Testament with one eye closed will still lead you to the inescapable conclusion that the church was God’s idea.  If you want to get rid of the church, you also need to get rid of Jesus.  He created it.  Maybe what bothers you should actually amaze you?  I understand that the idea of the church being imperfect hinders some people.  But rather than making us despair, the fact that Jesus started the church with imperfect people should make us marvel at God’s incredible grace.  The idea that God would use broken people to highlight His grace to the world is pretty amazing.  For sure, church can be messy.  People sin.  Most of the New Testament is not a story of an idealized church where everything worked perfectly all the time (just read 1 Corinthians any time you’re frustrated with your church).  Most of the New Testament is a story of Jesus using His followers to spread His love in spite of themselves and as they overcome obstacle after obstacle.  The fact that Christ uses flawed people to accomplish His work on earth is actually a sign of His grace, not a sign of His absence.  The church gives the world a front row seat to the grace of God.

Many today have a consumerism mentality when it comes to church.  At many churches, its more about the coffee and doughnuts they serve than the word they preach.  I agree that consumerism is a problem for Christianity.  Christian consumerism is not leading people into deeper discipleship or relationships with each other.  Now they are all alone, worshipping God on their schedule, when it’s convenient for them.  Listening to a podcast of their favorite preacher while being disconnected from community.

Disconnecting yourself from church is a very clever tactic of the devil.  The only one who wants us to believe that we are better off alone is our enemy.  The people who are leaving the church and claim faith in Jesus, 99.9% of them obtained that faith in Christ because of the mission of the church.  Very few people come to know Jesus because He appears to them supernaturally when they are alone and calls them by name.  Almost all of us who follow Jesus have had our lives changed by a flawed body called the church that Jesus so passionately loves and calls His own.  Think about that.  We need more churches, not fewer.  Does the church need to change?  Without a doubt.  The church needs a revelation of the grace of God.  So, what will the church of the future look like?  I’m not sure.  Will we gather in the same way in the future as we do now?  In some ways yes and in other ways no.  But regardless of how the church gathers in the future, we will gather…we need to gather more, not less.  We Christians need each other, probably now more than ever.  That’s why Jesus called us His sheep.  We are herd animals, not lone wolves.  We need to be part of a flock.  You are not a flock by yourself, you’re lunch.

Now, more than ever, the world needs Christians working together humbly under Christ to lead people into a growing relationship with Him, in whatever innovate and fresh forms that takes.  The church is not dead.  Far from it.  Maybe it’s just beginning to take shape for a brand new era that desperately needs it.