The Nature of the Church, Pt. 1: The Body of Christ

Here is the next installment of my series on the necessity of the local church for the believer, which attempts to convey the importance of the local church from the biblical nature of the church.

For an understanding of the importance of the church, we must turn to the Word of God, where the sovereign Lord of the Church has given vital insight into the nature of the Church, especially the local church, and why it is important for Christians to align themselves with a local body of believers. Wayne Grudem defines the Church as “the community of all true believers for all time” (853). While this is a very good definition, for the purposes of this discussion, the definition will be narrowed to believers post-Pentecost who were saved by hearing the gospel and responding in repentance and faith, because it is to these people that the New Testament writers like Paul wrote, expounding the doctrine of the church. There are many metaphors that the New Testament uses to describe the church, but three of them stand out in particular: the body of Christ, the family of God, and the building of God. Each of these metaphors convey different truths about how the church relates to God and to its members, but all of them speak to the unity which binds the members of the church, including the local church, together. The church is continually called the body of Christ in the New Testament, especially by the apostle Paul. The most clear passage explaining the importance of this concept of the church as a body is 1 Corinthians 12:12-27. In this passage, Paul begins by telling the Corinthians, who were beset by warring factions within the local church, that because each of the believers “were all baptized into one body” through “one Spirit” (v. 13), they were to be unified as Christ’s body. But in the next section (vv. 14-20), he clearly affirms diversity within the body of Christ, using the analogy of the different parts of the body that make up one body. This was important for Paul to emphasize, because the Corinthians had serious problems with pride and tended to exalt certain people with certain spiritual gifts above others in the church. This attitude has always crept into the church, causing those with more public gifts to become proud, which causes great harm to the fellowship of the body, and Paul is concerned to prevent this from happening. An important statement from this section is found in verse 18, affirming the sovereignty of God in distributing the spiritual gifts. Each believer has been given a specific gift, or multiple gifts, for use in a local church in the context of loving fellowship with other believers. The third and final section of this crucial passage (vv. 21-27), Paul deals a blow to individualistic selfish pride, repeating the concept of the importance of each member, whether they have a public gift or not. He also makes it crystal clear that the purpose of the distribution of spiritual gifts is the mutual care of each member of the body in love. In summary, the body metaphor is an excellent one for the church. All believers worldwide are part of the body of Christ, and this comes out in a beautiful way when one group of believers goes overseas to another country, and have fellowship with the believers there. But Paul’s concern in 1 Corinthians, and his concern in his most of his letters was for the local church, the local body of believers. This metaphor conveys the cohesive unity that believers ought to have with one another, exercised in frequent fellowship and service for edification.

Work Cited:

1. Grudem, Wayne. Systematic Theology. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2000. Print.