Articles
The Church
What is your concept of the church? Is it an institution? A thing? A place? An organization? We often hear in prayer: "Thank you Lord for the divine institution, the church." Is it? Is it a place we get into, and once we are there we are ready to ride out life to heaven?
Is Christ the church? One said, "All spiritual blessings are in Christ and Christ is the church, so all blessings are in the church. Therefore, if one is not in the church that one has no spiritual blessings." Are spiritual blessings in a thing? That is peculiar because the church is simply saved people. Therefore, that would mean all spiritual blessings are in saved people and you got to have in the saved people to get the blessings. That puts a person in a thing. It is the idea, here is the ark, if you miss it you are lost. Christ is not the church. He is the Savior. The church is not a society which is the means of our redemption. The church does not save, it is the saved. When we say one cannot be saved without being in the church, we mean that all who are saved become, by the same process, members of His universal church. His body.
Paul said, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ” (Eph. 1:3).
The Catholic encyclopedia says, "Only by entering the church can we participate in the redemption wrought for us by Christ." The Bible says, only by participating in the redemption wrought for us by Christ can we enter the church. The Catholic concept of the church is an institutional concept that puts a society between Christ and His people.
Christ is the head of the church only as He is the head of each individual that comprises it. (Eph. 5:22-33). It is not "we have to get into the church, this organization, institution, this place". That places something between Christ and the believer. The only way I can have Christ as my head is to be directly related to Him. Christ is the head when we accept His rule.
Church is a collective noun; in the singular form "church" collects or gathers together a number of individuals or objects into one. For example, a covey is a collective noun. If we are talking about birds and a man said, “I saw a covey of quail,” but it turns out he only saw a quail, he didn't see a covey. A covey is not a bird. Another example is a man says, “Come see my herd of cows,” but he only has one cow. A cow is not a herd. Herd is a collective noun. In this case it collects cows. In it’s singular form it collects a number of cows. One cow is not a herd, one quail is not a covey, one soldier is not a troop, and one saint is not a church.
So what? It has been asked about the Ethiopian nobleman, that when he got to Ethiopia he is the only saint there, so is there a church in Ethiopia? One says, “Yes, and he is the only member of it. How? One man is not a church. Another says, “Well, if you moved to some place and there's no church there, you are the church there because the church is the called out. Therefore you are the church. One man is called out but one man is not the church.
That is why we make a distinction between church being a collective noun and the called out. One fellow is called out but is not an assembly. So what? An understanding of this would be helpful in understanding the statement, “Whatever the individual can do the church can do. He is the church because he is called out.” No, one man isn’t the church and one man is not the church doing something any more than one cow is a herd and whatever the cow is doing the herd is doing.
Rickie
