If a close friend were to ask you if a group of people who gather at a local auditorium for a sermon on Sunday is a true church, how would you answer, "yes" or "no"? How will you decide? What will be your criteria? What distinguishes true churches from false churches?
This question does not arise often these days. There are gatherings of people whom we would not consider to be Christians, but whom we would call "churches" out of social convention. We speak of "Mormon churches" or even "Buddhist churches" without feeling that we are labeling those bodies Christian. We do this for the sake of convenience. When we call these congregations "churches," we merely mean that they are people who share an outlook on the ultimate nature of reality and who assemble regularly to sing, and hear spoken messages. When used in this fashion, "church" expresses the social status of a body, not its spiritual one.
When our friend asks about the people at the local auditorium, her question is different. She wants to know the spiritual status of the congregation. There are two ways Christians will determine this. Some try to determine if that congregation is a place where God is active and people know the Lord. Others judge a congregation's status by its doctrine.
The person who wishes to define the church based on the presence or absence of divine activity wants to make sure that there is more than just spiritual talk going on. He wants to see spiritual reality. A parrot can be taught to recite the Nicene Creed, but that won't save it. If we locate a true church by its adherence to a creed, are we not likely to find frigid churchmen who spend their time splitting theological hairs rather than preaching to the lost?
There are also dangers in trying to define the church by divine activity. The doctrinal churchman is likely to affirm that where God is, there will be spiritual activity, but he will be slow to agree that "God is where the action is." If we do not know our doctrine, how are we to know if we're witnessing God's activity, or that of another? Maybe Krishna and not Christ, is so fervently worshipped with upraised hands. Perhaps the long extemporaneous prayers are addressed not to the triune God, but to Allah. Maybe the Jesus being spoken of is not God the Son who paid for our sins, but a Jesus who teaches us moral lessons and magic tricks. We need doctrine to help us decide if we are getting involved with God, the devil, or our viscera.
The church is where God acts, but activity alone will not help us find the church. Right doctrine can help us to determine the legitimacy of what we find, but it will not guarantee a body is a true church. The Apostle James tells us that even demons can be orthodox. According to the reformers, the marks of the church were the proper teaching of the scriptures and the right administration of the sacraments. In these marks we have a guarantee of both doctrinal integrity and divine activity. We avoid the man-centeredness that inevitably comes when we try to define the church by either doctrine or spiritual activity alone.
A Manward Focus
Today there are many churches whose view of scripture is high, but still leave their members spiritually hungry. A battle-tested belief in inerrancy and a commitment to exegetical preaching do not guarantee spiritual life. If our Sunday morning services seem more like rotary club meetings more than encounters with God, the problem is a man-centered focus. Sadly, the pastoral staff often recognizes that the congregation has become a crowd of spectators in a Sunday event performed by the pastor and choir. They burden congregants with the belief that lack of focus on God, and not the excessive attention lavished on the choir and pastor, is responsible for the worship's spiritual emptiness. No amount of cajoling or chastising will be of any help, for the problem is not a lazy congregation, but an overactive pastor and choir. Hard though they may work, they cannot alleviate spiritual hunger with their practical sermons and inspiring music.
People hunger to know that they are in right relationship with God. According to the reformers, this does not happen by assenting to right doctrine or having power encounters. It takes place when the Gospel is applied to peoples' lives. The preached Word and the sacraments are the means of grace. When the reformers defined right preaching of the Word and proper administration of the sacraments to be marks of the church, they were safeguarding the gospel's application to our lives.
This emphasis on being "right" and "proper" might make us think of God as Mr. Manners, who rewards excruciatingly correct church behavior. The words "right" and "proper" bring with them fear of legalism, fear of pedantry, and fear of suffocating precision that squeezes every ounce of meaning from a Levitical law before allowing us to venture into something that is relevant to us. This puts us off. "Right" and "proper" are judgmental words when we apply them to ourselves. The reformers were more interested in the words "preached" and "administered."
"Preached" and "administered" tell us that a church is a place where we are receivers, not doers. We receive God's favor, but we deserve his wrath. The Law is written on our hearts, and sounds a responsive chord within us. The Gospel is not something we know intuitively; it is news. Since the Gospel seems to conflict with the Law–we know that we deserve wrath, but God grants us favor–it is especially important that we be confronted with the Gospel often, for it goes against what we expect from God. God is central in the church, not us. When the reformers said that it was right preaching and proper administration of the sacraments that mark the church, they were not making severe demands on us, but ensuring that we receive all there is to receive from God.
Proper Preaching
Proper preaching is Christ-centered. Teaching orthodox doctrine, proclaiming inerrancy of the scriptures, and carefully exegeting text are important, but do not guarantee that the preaching is proper, in the reformers' sense. If the pastor preaches on Isaiah one morning, and I wish to know if the preaching marks the congregation as a church, my first question will not be, "Did the pastor say that Isaiah was written by the prophet Isaiah", but "Did the pastor find Christ in the text, specifically the Christ who lived a perfect life in our place and bore our sins on a cross?" Congregations are filled with people who are confronted every day by the accusation of the Law. Even if the pulpit ministry at our churches does not convict them, Christians are convicted by the Law through conscience and personal Bible reading. If people do not hear the Gospel weekly, they will feel far from God, even if they have received state-of-the-art instruction in spiritual growth techniques.
Proper Administration
If the Word is preached properly, why do we need the sacraments? Most of us would not advocate disposing of them altogether, but are they really necessary? Doesn't the church exist where two or more are gathered in his name?
The answer may be found in the Reformation motto "by faith alone." If a person has true faith in Christ, he is saved. Perhaps Gospel preaching led to salvation. God has other means of working, too–the sacraments. In the sacraments we have the Gospel attached to an outward sign.
In baptism, water is the outward sign of the Gospel. God has promised that he who believes and is baptized shall be saved. If saving faith is a trust in God's Gospel promises, we exercise saving faith by believing this promise. This view of baptism allows us to make sense of passages that tell us that baptism saves us (e.g. Acts 2:38; 1 Pt 3:21), and incidents where people are saved without baptism (e.g. the thief on the cross). Faith can arise in response to promises presented in a Gospel sermon, or in response to God's promise in baptism.
Baptism is rightly administered when people are baptized in water in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit for the forgiveness of sins. It is wrongly administered when done in the name of Jesus only. It is wrongly administered when it is withheld from infants on the grounds that they cannot believe. Baptism replaces Old Testament circumcision. (Col 2:11-12) Like infants, adults cannot believe in Christ of their own power, but faith is a gift of God. (Eph 2:9) If God can fill infants with the Holy Spirit from before birth (Lk 1:15), certainly he can create the faith that baptism requires within them.
In the Lord's Supper, the bread and wine are the outward sign of the Gospel. We may be saved by trusting that the blood of Christ has paid for our sins, but how much more is our faith strengthened when God offers the ransom payment for us to partake of! We do not await a future judgment, desperately hoping that we will remember some past encounter with Christ. God has declared his favor toward us. If our mental experience of Christ is too ethereal for us to grasp, our mouths are made of more solid stuff, and we can receive Christ that way.
The Lord's Supper is properly administered when the body and blood of Christ are offered to Christians for the forgiveness of their sins. It is not properly administered when it is withheld, or it is done under a different understanding. If this sacrament is seen as a mere memorial, it is not really a sacrament. We might be tempted to think that even those who misunderstand the sacrament will receive the benefits because God is gracious. It is true that God is gracious, but the benefit of the sacrament is the strengthening of the faith that comes from knowing that we have received salvation. Where this knowledge is absent, the sacrament is fruitless, for knowledge of salvation is the fruit of the sacrament. Those who present the sacrament as a memorial of Christ's death do not administer the sacrament properly. They administer something else. It may be an emotionally moving, even helpful, memorial of Christ's redemptive work. But it is not the Lord's Supper.
God's Church
There are two marks of the church: right preaching and the proper administration of the sacraments. Where these two marks are, there is the church. Do you remember the church in question at the beginning of this discussion? Is it a true church? The preaching is biblical, and they have performed baptisms. Communion is celebrated, but we haven't figured out the erratic schedule.
When we answer this question, we must be aware of our purpose for having an answer. We do not want to determine whether or not it is legitimate to attend a service. The evidence tells us that it is. Our real question is: "What is God trying to do?" He is rescuing a people from a doomed race. Where the Word is rightly preached and the sacraments properly administered, God rescues a people for himself. He proclaims his favor, baptizes them into his death, and offers them his body and blood for their salvation. Where the Word is rightly preached, and the sacraments properly administered, the church is focused on God, because God is the one who acts. It is his church. It is not pastor so-and-so's congregation where they hear about techniques they can use to get to God; it is the place where God comes to them.
Is the congregation down the street a place where God acts through Word and sacrament? Is the Word proclaimed rightly, as a message of Christ's life and death? Are the sacraments administered properly? Are people united to Christ by being baptized into his death, by partaking of his body and blood? If so, that congregation is a place where God is saving a people for himself; it is a true church.
