If I asked you to name the most controversial Christian teaching today, what would you say? Some might say LGBT+ issues, some Jesus’s divinity, some the doctrine of eternal punishment. My answer might be unexpected: the necessity of the church.
Over my years serving as a pastor to college students, I’ve received more confused responses, pushback, and dismissiveness when it comes to the church’s necessity than any other point of theology. Many Christian students will acknowledge the need for Christian friendships or some type of Christian community, but as for the fullness of the church—church as both gathered and scattered, organism and organization—there’s often ambivalence. They aren’t denying the need for community but are skeptical that the church is necessary in fulfilling this need.
This is the case for a wide array of people on the spiritual spectrum, from new Christians all the way to those who’ve passionately proclaimed allegiance to Jesus for their whole lives.
I don’t think this ambivalence usually has at its root a dramatic change in religious beliefs or commitments. As I’m honored to hear students’ stories over a meal or coffee, I often hear, “We went to church for a period of time when I was little, but after ______ we stopped going. We still believe in Jesus though.”
The event that fills in the blank can be something as traumatic as the prominent Christian in the family, such as a grandmother, passing away. Or it could be something as subtle as a busy athletics schedule that eroded the habit of church involvement over time. As a result of these events, I often hear, “I didn’t really grow up in church, but I grew up in a Christian home, if that makes sense.” Do these stories have a common thread running through them?
Authentic Spiritual Journey
It’s impossible to reduce so many different people’s stories down to one common cause, but I suspect what’s often hidden under these stories is a belief absorbed unconsciously from our culture: the more individual, inward, and disconnected from institutions a spiritual journey is, the purer it is and the closer that person is to God. It feels less spiritual and authentic to move outward to be shaped by a structured community and to have your faith tethered to the church. The church can be nice but not essential to a thriving Christian walk.
Indeed, the church can be seen as dangerous in this framework, a slippery slope into having “religion but not relationship.” Given such beliefs, when involvement in the church becomes inconvenient or too uncomfortable, it’s cast aside.
Relatedly, we’ve often believed that an inward decision alone makes one a Christian, while ignoring the church’s key role. In this framework, baptism and church membership lose their pivotal roles in the conversion process. But as we read the Bible, Christians as independent individuals don’t definitively declare themselves as Christians. Jesus has given that responsibility to the church (Matt. 18:15–20; 1 Cor. 5:1–6:8).
We’ve often believed that an inward decision alone makes one a Christian, while ignoring the church’s key role.
As we consider the next generation’s posture toward the church, we must seriously ask, “What place does the church have in an increasingly post-Christian society?” A Christian faith that has hitched itself to the church is doomed to failure, it’d seem.
We’re in an age where people are leaving the church like never before. As Jim Davis and Michael Graham have pointed out in their book The Great Dechurching, “We are currently experiencing the largest and fastest religious shift in the history of our country. . . . More people have left the church in the last twenty-five years than all the new people who became Christians from the First Great Awakening, Second Great Awakening, and Billy Graham crusades combined.”
Despite our cultural trends, for the Christian faith to have a meaningful, long-term influence in the lives of the next generation, we must not only embrace the church but also labor to strengthen it and make it an essential part of our evangelistic methods. As our Lord has done, we must love the church and place our confidence in its future. For us to help the next generation see the beauty of Christ and his church, there must be three marriages.
1. The Church and Embodiment
We must marry our theological anthropology to a rich ecclesiology. People often don’t know it, but they need the church. Every one of us has a deep and enduring problem—we crave rich community. However, the cultural air we breathe teaches us to distrust God’s answer to our craving.
Like a waiter who serves diners, faithful Christian evangelism persuades people to eat the best dish on the menu, even one that might look unappetizing at first glance. We befriend lonely neighbors and invite them into the communion of the saints. We counsel emerging adults hungry for wisdom and connect them to mothers and fathers in the faith. We embrace friends who feel spiritually dirty and pour the waters of baptism on them. We walk with isolated people looking for an embodied faith and bring them to the Lord’s table in the context of the local church. We challenge unanchored souls looking for purpose and sweep them up into the mission of God’s people.
Out of all the options on the menu, we point them to the church.
2. The Church and Mission
In an age of spiritual decline, we must marry our missiology to our ecclesiology. I believe there are essential tenets of the church to which Christians must commit themselves to see the gospel compel people to faith. These tenets flow out of the scriptural pattern and confessional belief that outside the church “there is no ordinary possibility of salvation” (Westminster Confession of Faith 25.2). The primary place where God works in the world is in and through his church, through which Christ “preached peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near” (Eph. 2:17).
In our desire to reach the next generation, Christians mustn’t reinvent the church or replace the church; we must cling to the church’s blueprint given to us by God in Scripture. If we’re honest, plenty of us are embarrassed by the church’s failures. However, when a kitchen knife is dull, we don’t abandon knives altogether. We sharpen it.
While distrust of authority and power is at an all-time high, let’s educate, rigorously train, and solemnly ordain our elders and deacons. While many claim that truth changes with the times, let’s devote ourselves to the apostles’ teachings as our unmoving foundation. In an age when celebrity pastors have illegitimately become quasi bishops through the worldly accumulation of power, let’s submit to the church’s accountability structures and decision-making processes. In a time when Christian influencers determine orthodoxy in blogosphere councils, let’s compassionately embrace the church’s creeds and confessions. The church still can, and must, be the church.
Christians mustn’t see the church as tangential to the spiritual growth of the next generation but as central to it. This holds true not only scripturally but also empirically. According to Barna’s report on Gen Z, a deep involvement in the church is an essential ingredient in the lives of resilient Gen Z disciples. While Barna’s data showed there wasn’t a drastic difference between a habitual churchgoing Christian and a resilient disciple at the level of his or her “cognitive understandings of the Christian faith,” the most significant difference between those two groups was a deep, personal connection with their church communities. Spiritual depths are found in the depths of the church.
3. The Church and Christ
Most importantly, we must behold Jesus’s marriage to the church. Jesus loves the church and delights to use it. The plan to center the church in the future of the Christian faith might sound absurd, but we plan to point the next generation to the church because this is Jesus’s plan.
Christians mustn’t see the church as tangential to the spiritual growth of the next generation but as central to it.
In a culture that sees the church as a stronghold of hypocrisy, 1 Timothy tells us it’s a “pillar and buttress of the truth” (1 Tim. 3:15). While it feels like the church is falling apart, Jesus says, “I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” (Matt. 16:18). Though many see no future for the church, Ephesians tells us that God’s plan for the church is eternal (Eph. 3:10–11). When the world claims to love Jesus but hate the church, God tells us, “Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” (5:25). Though the church needs a makeover, Jesus will “present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish” (v. 27).
In this day and age, we’re invested in the church because God has already invested in his church, “not with perishable things such as silver or gold, but with the precious blood of Christ” (1 Pet. 1:18–19). God has made the church his home (Eph. 2:22) and is working all things to its benefit (1:22). The church is a central part of God’s future plan, and so it must be a part of ours, no matter how post-Christian our culture might become.
The Gospel Coalition