A friend has spent a few years trying to find a church after a cross-country move. It’s not that he didn’t want to find a church. It’s not that there aren’t churches to be found where he lives now. He has gone to a lot of churches. A lot of misses. A few hits. Lots and lots of considerations go into choosing a church: family, worship style, theology, denomination, culture (waayyy bigger than most of us realize) and more. He was in a place for a while until the stuff under the surface—church politics, some really unhealthy understandings of how to be Christian in the world and more—became just too much. It was not easy to leave, but necessary.
Another person has struggled for connection of late. Very long-time member of his church. Involved. Or he has been. Lately though, he has struggled to connect, to want to connect. It’s easy to place blame: a winter of recurring illness and an ease of online church, inertia setting in, being out of town for legitimate (even ministry related) reasons, a growing sense of unease surrounding worship and size, even philosophy of ministry.
It would be easy to simply justify (or dismiss) the struggles of these men. It would also be easy to dump a pious platitude about the need for “community” or to jump on the social media train about the “male loneliness epidemic”, the dangers of church shopping narcissism or any of a hundred other things. But all of that masks the deeper questions.
Questions like: What is church even for?
There’s a question that probably doesn’t even occur to the average church goer or to those who never go. But there are always assumptions below the surface. Implicit understandings that we don’t generally recognize or talk about.
Which is precisely why it is the kind of question anyone seriously involved in ministry must ask themselves. It is a question we need to be able to answer for ourselves if we are going to lead. It is a question that we need the “people in pews” to be asking themselves and have a decent ability to answer. Because there are both internal and external implications to our response.
In an increasingly fractured culture, combined with the mind-numbing addiction we have to all things social media, and a highly individualized view of pretty much everything, much less spirituality, it is imperative that we think deeply about what the church is for. That said, even the question itself and the way we tend to answer it betrays certain ways of viewing and being in the world—assumptions that we are often unaware of—that radically affect our ability to think clearly about the church.
To ask what something is for is to ask a fundamentally utilitarian question. It necessarily instrumentalizes a thing, reduces it to what it does, and by extension what it does for me. While what something does is important, is an aspect of what it is, to reduce the thing or person or institution to that aspect is to run the risk of not simply devaluing it but fundamentally misunderstanding it. Is a father no longer a father if a child dies or he can no longer provide due to misfortune or illness? Does a company cease to be one because it has to adapt to a changing market? At the end of the day what something is,while not separate from what it is for, must come first. Because only then can we really get an accurate picture of what something is for, especially the church.
We are so used to thinking in terms of utility, of function, that we have a very difficult time thinking in any other way. Church leaders obviously care about the state of the church. It’s in our vested interest to do so. But think of the ways we tend to do it. How many ministry books and classes are first utilitarian in their orientation? Leadership, structures, policies, organization, mission and vision, constitutions and even doctrinal statements developed to head off lawsuits and increase efficiencies? None of these are bad things. One could legitimately argue they are all necessary components of church life in the 21st Century West.
But as important as all these may be, when we reduce the church to what it is for, we have already lost. We have subtly, unconsciously, and uncritically absorbed the cultural notion that church is a purveyor of religious goods and services—there primarily to satiate some spiritual need that we (read, “I”) have. At the end of the day when it comes to goods and services, it really is all about me. The customer is always right.
We think this way about church because we think this way about virtually everything in our worlds. And I mean worlds. We construct worlds to suit our needs: family, work, friendships, healthcare, and more. This is not new and should not be surprising. In 1995 on Seinfeld, George Costanza complains loudly about “worlds colliding!”[i] For over 15 years one of the most popular video games is Minecraft, in which players build their own worlds. Young, old, or somewhere in between, we are used to the idea of curating our own lives in every conceivable way, of creating worlds specially designed for ourselves. Why wouldn’t we do it with our spiritual needs?
In his recent book, The Reason for Church, Brad Edwards states:
Early in ministry, I expected that the hardest part of being a pastor would be persuading non-Christians that God exists. By several orders of magnitude, it has been much harder to persuade anyone that church is good or beautiful.[ii]
This alone is a strong enough statement about the way we as a society, including believers, view the church. The landscape has changed. Edwards elaborates:
Overwhelmingly, distrust is now our society’s default posture towards all institutions (including the church). Because I didn’t even have a category for the church as an “institution”—let alone an awareness of my own anti-institutional bias—I was woefully unequipped for shepherding our church through what I only now understand as the beginning of an age defined by countless and often conflicting flavors of radical individualism. Although it sure seemed like that shift happened gradually and then suddenly during the pandemic, the signs and symptoms of change had already been spreading for several years. I just didn’t recognize them as such.[iii]
There is a lot to unpack in those few sentences, but Edwards is pointing to something we all deal with. Something we can’t not deal with because it is the very cultural air we breathe.
We all know that there is an increasing distrust in our culture for institutions. I regularly find myself in the front of that line, especially when it comes to culturally powerful institutions. Whether governmental or educational, civic or business, pharmaceutical or insurance, you name it and I am by default skeptical and far too often tinged with cynicism. My, our, instinctual distrust in institutions is not entirely without merit even if it can veer toward overreaction. I don’t want to be there with the church, but I often am. I am a protestant, heir in some small way to Martin Luther and his 95 theses even if I am not a Lutheran. In fact, my Baptist heritage probably makes me more likely to cast an anti-institutional eye toward the church. Even so, we all know that institutions are necessary for societies, for life, to work. As John Donnne famously said, “no man is an island.” The larger something gets the more we need institutional structures, flawed as they may be.
There is also no doubt that we are culturally hyper individualistic. That I myself (what a loaded phrase!), am far too centered on myself. That even while I don’t like it about myself, it is a very real problem. Edwards’ observations don’t just apply “out there” or to “those people”, whomever they might be, but to all of us. Our individualism can subvert bonds between us in ways that make it virtually impossible for institutions to function and, ironically, individuals to flourish. Still, while our individualism is quite often problematic, it also brings benefits. The belief that we, I, can achieve something no matter who I am, where I was born, my class, my gender, my ethnicity, etc., etc., etc. On a faith level, we are saved as individuals—“whosoever will may come”.
As Edwards notes, our distrust and our individualism make it extremely hard to actually believe the church matters. Because in a culture that centers the self, that looks askance at institutions and views all things through a utilitarian lens, the self becomes central and necessarily self-determined. At once and alluring promise and an awful burden as Alan Noble argues in You are Not Your Own. Edwards names this the sacred self, “the belief that we, individually, are our only reliable source for truth and, especially, identity.”[iv]
Now to be fair, most Christians would never say that out loud. We don’t think we believe it. But too often we act it. We are the proverbial frog in the kettle, and the flame has slowly been moving from low to high. To put it another way, the air we breathe is poisoned and like carbon monoxide it is odorless and tasteless. No wonder we view the church as a dispenser of religious goods and services whether we know it or not.
Which means that before we answer the important question of what the church is for, we must ask What is the church?The tension between individuals and institutions is real. But I believe in that tension we find truth. We are saved as individuals, we believe as individuals. But what are we saved from and what are we saved to? What do we believe? We are saved from sin. We are saved to God. We believe, first and foremost, in him. And if we stop there, we all too easily end up in a highly individualistic faith. We reduce salvation, we reduce belief, to spiritual self-help even if unwittingly.
But God didn’t give us an institution, at least not in the 21st Century corporate way we tend to think of them. Edwards small comment “I didn’t even have a category for the church as ‘institution’” is telling. Because the church functions as an institution, can have the benefits and problems of institutions, but fundamentally, that is not what it is. To be clear, churches, need structure and systems, even hierarchies because things need to get done. None of that is in question. But first and foremost, the church is the people of God, united with him and one another in Christ. Throughout Scripture, God calls a people. Jesus says he will build his church. His church. Not ours, not mine, not yours, not Baptist, or Presbyterian, or Catholic, or big or small, or the one that worships like I want or preaches like I want or “fits me,” or any other thing we come up with. His church. Yes, it has a mission, yes it has leaders, yes it has functions, but if we don’t get the “is” right first, the “for” will go off the rails in a hurry. And the scary part is we may not notice.
Two of the most often used metaphors for the church in the New Testament are the Body of Christ and Family or Household of God. It strikes me that together these images make the Great Commandment (you shall love the lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. You shall love your neighbor as yourself) tangible. The church is to be the Great Commandment lived out. We simply can’t do that if the church is just a collection of individual believers because we will all, eventually look to ourselves first and foremost. And we can’t do that if it is simply a spiritual institution because eventually it will become bloated, corrupt, and probably worse.
I believe much of our cultural angst lies in the fact that we instinctively know that individualism, pushed to its logical conclusion is not sustainable but we don’t know how to escape it. We see pushes in secular spaces, especially among young people, toward utopian collectivist ideas and ideals. These too will inevitably fail—those of us old enough to remember the cold war have seen it first-hand. But the church offers a necessary corrective first to ourselves and second to the wider world.
Because while we come to faith as individuals, as soon as we do, we inherit a new family. The Family of God. There is no such thing as a Christian without the church. You want Jesus? You get the church. Warts and all. Its messy and difficult and glorious and God’s means of forming us into his image.
What is the church? I am. You are. WE are. Neither a collection of individuals nor and institution. God’s people, his called-out ones, loving him and one another. Living, breathing visions of the Great Commandment for the world to see. And if we aren’t living it, why on earth would anyone on the outside believe us? Because we are proving that all we are is purveyors of religious goods and services, but we are charlatans who don’t believe in what we are selling.
[i] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0697758/
[ii] Brad Edwards, The Reason for Church, (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Reflective, 2025), xvi. Emphasis in original.
[iii] Ibid.
[iv] Ibid, 27.
