Why we need the Church

One of the stranger features of modern Christian life is that many of us have learned to want Christ without the people he gathers. We can speak warmly of Jesus while treating the Church as optional infrastructure: useful when it teaches, sings, serves, or comforts us; dispensable when it disappoints, demands, or wounds. This instinct is especially understandable among Christians formed to prize a personal relationship with Jesus. That language contains an essential truth: no ecclesial affiliation, liturgical habit, or sacramental participation can substitute for repentance, faith, and love of God. Yet when received in isolation, it can subtly detach Christ from his body, worship from the gathered assembly, and spiritual life from the ordinary practices through which God has promised to form and sustain his people.

For some, this detachment happens almost imperceptibly. Life becomes busier, Sunday worship irregular, the livestream or podcast “good enough”, and private devotion less burdensome than corporate obligation. For others, the reasons are far more serious. They have known spiritual abuse, clerical manipulation, institutional cowardice, or the deep pain of seeing the Church protect itself rather than the vulnerable. In such cases, appeals to “come back to church” can sound not only naive but cruel, as though the wound were being denied for the sake of institutional maintenance.

Any serious Christian account of the Church must begin by refusing that denial. The Church has failed grievously. Those failures require repentance, truth-telling, discipline, and repair. They cannot be waved away by sacramental theology or appeals to authority. Yet neither can the failures of the Church abolish the gift and command of the Church. If Christ has joined himself to a people, then the question is not whether we can imagine a less painful, less demanding, or less compromised form of spirituality. The question is whether we are willing to receive the life Christ has actually given.

The New Testament does not present participation in the gathered Church as an optional enhancement to private faith. The author of Hebrews exhorts Christians to “consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds”, and then immediately adds that they must not neglect meeting together, “as is the habit of some”, but encourage one another as the Day approaches (Hebrews 10:24-25, NRSV). This is not a merely pragmatic instruction, as though church attendance were one useful tool among many for maintaining religious interest. The command assumes that perseverance in faith is a corporate matter. We are responsible, under God, not only for our own endurance but also for the encouragement, correction, and strengthening of one another.

Acts gives us the same pattern in narrative form. The newly baptized “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers” (Acts 2:42, NRSV). Here the Christian life is recognizably ecclesial from the beginning. It includes doctrine, fellowship, sacramental meal, and common prayer. None of these can be reduced to private religious feeling. The apostles’ teaching is received within a community. Fellowship is not mere affinity but shared life in Christ. The breaking of bread is not a vague symbol of togetherness but the worshipping act by which the risen Lord feeds his people. The prayers are not simply individual petitions offered in parallel, but the common voice of the body turned toward God.

This does not mean that God is absent from the home, the hospital room, the solitary walk, or the private place of prayer. Of course he is present there. Timothy Radcliffe is right to say that we encounter God in many ways: in love, beauty, and holy lives. But, as he argues in Why Go to Church: The Drama of the Eucharist, when we hear the Scriptures in worship, we are not simply gathering religious information. We are encountering the God whose story becomes our own. Private reading may instruct and console us, but the public reading of Scripture in the assembly places us inside a people who were addressed by God before we arrived and will continue to be addressed after we are gone.

This is also why the sacraments are not incidental. Christianity is not a disembodied philosophy about God, nor is it simply an inward attachment to Jesus. The Word became flesh. The risen Christ did not discard his body. The Church therefore cannot be treated as an unfortunate material shell around an otherwise spiritual religion. In Baptism and the Eucharist, the Dominical Sacraments—that is, the sacraments instituted by Christ himself—we are given physical, public, ecclesial signs of grace. We are washed with water. We eat bread and drink wine. We are not merely reminded of divine favor; we are incorporated into Christ and nourished in him.

St Paul’s language in 1 Corinthians presses this point with particular force. The cup and the bread are a “sharing” in the blood and body of Christ, and because there is one bread, “we who are many are one body” (1 Corinthians 10:16-17, NRSV). The Eucharist does not simply express a unity we have already achieved by preference, temperament, or shared background. It forms and reveals a unity given in Christ. By the time Paul turns to the image of the Church as Christ’s body in 1 Corinthians 12, the claim is not metaphorical decoration. It is a theological reality with practical demands: the members belong to one another, and none may say to another, “I have no need of you”.

This is one of the sharpest challenges to modern Christian individualism. It is easy enough to say, “I need Jesus, but I do not need the Church”, especially when the Church has been frustrating, boring, compromised, or harmful. But the body cannot be separated from its head without doing violence to both. To belong to Christ is to be drawn into his people, including people we did not choose. The Church is not a voluntary association of the spiritually compatible. It is the body into which we are baptized, the household in which we are taught to pray, the people with whom we receive mercy and learn repentance.

This is also where authority must be addressed honestly. Many people distrust the Church not because they are childish or rebellious, but because authority has been exercised sinfully. Clergy have abused power. Leaders have hidden truth. Communities have punished the wounded for naming their wounds. Too often, children, women, racial minorities, and others with less institutional power have borne the cost of ecclesial self-protection. These things are evil, and Christians should say so without evasion. Yet the answer to abusive authority cannot finally be the disappearance of authority. A Church without accountable authority is not safer; it is often merely less honest about who holds power. Faithful authority is meant to guard the vulnerable, preserve apostolic teaching, administer the sacraments, correct sin, and serve the communion of the body. When authority fails in these tasks, it must be judged by them, not replaced by the private sovereignty of each believer.

This is part of why the diaconal vocation matters to me as a way of framing the question. The deacon is called to bring the Church to the world and the needs of the world to the Church. That vocation does not permit the Church to speak only to those comfortably inside its walls. It requires attention to those who have become estranged: the wounded, the skeptical, the apathetic, the disappointed, and those who still desire Christ while no longer knowing what to do with his Church. This is not an abstract concern for me. Part of my diaconal service has involved safeguarding work at both parish and diocesan levels, and that work has made it harder, not easier, to speak cheaply about return, trust, or repair. But if the Church is to meet such people faithfully, it must offer more than institutional self-defense. It must offer the life of Christ as he has given it: embodied, communal, sacramental, and accountable.

Radcliffe makes a related point when he reflects on the resurrection. Many say they can accept Jesus but not the Church. Yet the risen Christ does not appear as a private possession for isolated believers. He gathers the scattered disciples, the very ones who denied him and fled. His forgiveness creates a shared life. Radcliffe writes that this gathered communion is “his resurrection bursting into our lives”. That is a demanding claim, because it means the resurrection is not only a doctrine to be believed or a comfort to be cherished inwardly. It is the beginning of a reconciled people, visibly and bodily drawn back together by the Lord they had abandoned.

Robert Louis Wilken, reading Augustine, helps us see why this matters not only for individual Christians but for the world. In The Spirit of Early Christian Thought, Wilken argues that Augustine did not imagine a neutral secular space in which God could be bracketed while human beings built justice on their own. Augustine was concerned with the worship of the true God and with the community formed by that worship. As Wilken puts it, the Church is both “a social fact” and “an eschatological sign”: a visible people on pilgrimage, with its own language, rituals, calendar, practices, and culture.

This does not mean that the Church exists to seize cultural power or to baptize every institutional ambition. Quite the opposite. Wilken says that the Church is “not an instrument” for some other end than fellowship with God. The Church serves society most faithfully by being unapologetically itself: a worshipping body ordered toward God, bearing witness to the justice and peace that human beings cannot finally secure by technique, sentiment, or coercion. Augustine’s vision is not of a Church that withdraws from the world, but of a Church whose public life gives the world a glimpse of another city.

In this sense, participation in the Church is not only necessary for the individual Christian’s formation. It is also part of the Church’s witness. A scattered collection of private spiritual preferences cannot show the world what reconciliation looks like. It cannot display Jew and Gentile, rich and poor, young and old, wounded and healed, strong and weak, kneeling at the same altar. It cannot teach us to confess sins we would rather hide, forgive people we would rather avoid, receive gifts we cannot manufacture, or submit our desires to a story older and larger than ourselves. The Church can do these things only by being a Church: gathered, taught, fed, corrected, and sent.

None of this removes the difficulty. For some, returning to corporate worship may require time, counsel, boundaries, and wise pastoral care. For others, it may require finding a parish where repentance, safety, and sacramental faithfulness are more than words. I hope this is the kind of community my own parish is continuing, however imperfectly, to become. No one should be asked to pretend that betrayal did not happen or that ecclesial language is harmless when it has been used as a weapon. The wounds of the body must be tended truthfully within the body, not dismissed for the comfort of those who feel less pain.

Yet the invitation remains because Christ remains. For the wounded or wary, the next faithful step may be small: a conversation with a trusted priest or pastor, a return to Morning Prayer, a Sunday visit without pretending to be ready for everything, or the slow work of allowing trustworthy Christians to bear witness by their actions as well as their words. But the direction of that step still matters. Christ does not save us into abstraction. He baptizes us into his death and resurrection. He feeds us with his body and blood. He gives pastors and teachers, brothers and sisters, discipline and forgiveness, Scripture and prayer. He gathers those who have fled, failed, doubted, and hidden behind locked doors, and he speaks peace to them. Then he sends them.

The question, then, is not whether the Church has always made this easy to believe. It has not. The question is whether the failures of Christians are stronger than the gift of Christ. To participate in the Church is to confess, however haltingly, that they are not. It is to receive again the life we did not invent, among the people we did not choose, by the grace we cannot give ourselves. And it is to become, together, a sign of the kingdom for which the world still longs: a people gathered by Christ, made one in him, and sent for the life of the world.