From my friend Reed Merino
The Importance Of The Church: God’s Kingdom Among Men!
There is no need more urgent on our planet than that apostolic Christianity should be restored. Considering the desperate conditions that exist on this planet, that is a bold statement indeed! Poverty and hunger, suicidal loneliness, political and racial hatreds, people slipping over the brink into insanity, families disintegrating: can the establishment of a “religious” organization really be more important than the resolution of those wretched conditions? Properly understood, the answer is a resounding “yes!”
And I do not say this lightly: decades ago, I knew what it was like to fear that suicide might be the only alternative to a total breakdown. And perhaps like you, during the course of my life of eight decades, I have known loneliness to the point of tears; I have felt the fear of failure and have known deep anxiety about whether I might “go under” financially. Yet I still say that there is no need more urgent than that the Christianity of Christ and His apostles should be restored. You see, if the churches were to enter into the Biblical teaching and obedience described in the following chapters, she would provide a form of human society within which none of those wretched conditions mentioned above would ever need exist again!
We humans have many basic needs, and even more subtle ones. God’s design for His redeemed children is that we satisfy those needs not simply as individuals, or even as families, or even as the typical “church,” but as the tightly knit communities of disciples of Jesus that are described within the New Testament. Hear this, Christian: Christ in His church is God’s solution to all human needs and problems, not just its [supposedly] “religious” ones! Governments down through the ages have addressed, with varying degrees of seriousness and various degrees of success, what they considered to be the pressing problems of man. Sadly, history shows us that they have never been able to provide an adequate solution to those problems; and there are no grounds for believing that such an inability will ever change. Within the society of the Church of Christ (and only in His Church) there is indeed such a solution: a solution that actually used to exist, and a solution that God intends to restore!
The church described in the New Testament is not simply a center of worship and “religious” actions. God’s idea of “religion that is pure and undefiled” (James 1:27) includes much more than our usual categories of “religion.” God’s kingdom is not a formless mass of individuals whose belief and practice are carried out in private; nor is it the loose-knit association that gathers together a few times a week for “religious” activity, such as is characterized by Christendom’s Christianity. When the Kingdom of God is manifested on the earth, a visible society is created. As created by God, the church is that society of regenerated humans who have accepted Jesus as the divinely appointed ruler of the entire race of man. Her charter is to demonstrate how the entire race of humans could function if they yielded to the authority and the Spirit of God’s Anointed One. His church is the sphere where God’s plans for the “total man” and for every aspect of human society are accomplished. Indeed, the church is the true form of human society!-such is her call; such is what is necessarily implied in being “Christ’s body” (1 Corinthians 12:27 NASB)), “the pillar and support of the truth” (1 Timothy 3:15), “a chosen race,…a holy nation,…the people of God” (1 Peter 2:9-10 NASB).
Think of the kind of conditions which had to have existed in the apostolic church in order for it to be instinctively described by them as a “body,” a “race,” a “nation” and a “people.” Most of us contemporary Christians are so used to reading those terms and so used to thoughtlessly and invalidly applying them to our forms of Christianity that we fail to see the obvious-that theological “ignored elephant in the living room”: they are terms that can only be applied to a group of people that is very tightly knit together. Can you honestly apply those terms to whatever group of Christians to which you now belong? Are the members of your congregation so tightly knit together that all of you function in this world as one organism, one body? Is your congregation’s community life so complete-so mutually committed to one another’s well-being, and so well organized to enable all of you to survive and flourish in all aspects of life-that you find the term “nation” a natural way to describe yourselves? I suspect not. Yet those were the very terms that came to the apostles’ inspired minds when they sought to describe the church they knew. The difference between their Christianity and what we have gotten used to calling Christianity is profound, Pilgrim!
If a member of an apostolic brotherhood were to suddenly find him or herself in one of Christendom’s congregations today, what differences do you think they would detect? They would notice significant differences in doctrine, worship, and organization, to be sure. But I suspect they would be most distressed because of another difference they would quickly sense. It is a difference like the difference between marriage and casual dating: the difference between an intimate, life- long relationship of people who have “all things in common” (Acts 2:44), versus a “meaningful relationship” that serves merely to take the edge off of our loneliness and to enable us to have some enjoyable and creative times together. It is a difference like the difference between the U.S. Marines and the Boy Scouts of America: the difference between a brotherhood whose way of life effectively prepares its members to march right into the jaws of death together, versus one that exists primarily to provide nice bonding times together. It is a difference like the difference between theater and reality: between “make believe” and “is.” That is how far the Christianity we know has been removed from the reality called “apostolic Christianity,” the Christianity described in the New Testament, and manifested for some centuries.
Contemporary Christianity is not even living a way of life that is up to the standards of ancient Israel, and yet we who think that we are followers of Jesus tend to think that we can look down upon them as our legalistic and primitive spiritual inferiors! To see current ecclesiastical organizations calling themselves a valid manifestation of “Christ’s Church,” but who have lost both the vision and the heart to “put their money where their mouth is” is somewhat like the way we would feel if we saw a really crack company of Marine soldiers marching and tossing and spinning their bayonetted rifles with awesome precision and elegance-only to learn that they had quit using their weapons for actual combat and had given up actually fighting their nation’s enemies!
Are you willing to happily pay the price to become an individual member of His Church?
Let me know if you are!
You can learn more about Reed and his books by going to reedmerino.com.
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