Finding a church is hard work. For many, it involves week after week of making visit after visit, scouring websites, and listening to multiple messages. Despite the difficulty, it’s good for us to take care when trying to find a church though. That’s because finding and committing yourself to a local congregation is incredibly important.

The word “church” is the Greek word ekkllesia which comes from the verb meaning “to call out.” Therefore, “church” is the New Testament designation for those who have been called out.

Out of darkness into light. Out of sin into freedom. Out of death into life. The word only refers to a local institution secondarily; primarily, it’s a term that doesn’t specify a membership card or a locality, but rather a world-wide group that all people enter into when they start walking with Jesus. That means if you’re a Christian, you’re part of the church whether you like it or not.

The church is, by its nature, a people; it is the collective term for who we are as a group of Christians. The church is our identity as well as a group we participate in. This helps answer the question of whether or not the church is optional for the Christian – the answer, of course, is no, because to abandon the church is to abandon ourselves.

Active participation in the local expression of the church is assumed for the writers of the New Testament because leaving that local expression was, I believe, equivalent to leaving the faith.

So how can you find a good church? Here are three questions to ask:

1. Can I be protected here?

The New Testament is full of warnings about false teaching, for even in those early days of the church there were offshoots of Christianity that were growing. In fact, much of the New Testament writing was aimed at keeping the doctrine of the church pure.