Here’s a question for you: Do you need to attend church to be a Christian? What about being a member of a church? Is that necessary for a believer to grow and mature as God intends?

To hear many Christians talk—and this would probably be the opinion of many more if you could read their thoughts—the idea of being a vital, connected member of a church seems strange, unnecessary, maybe even a little antiquated. After all, if the goal is to grow as a Christian—to learn more about God, to understand and act out our faith more consistently—why should we think the church is so important? The best Bible teachers on the planet podcast their preaching; there are energetic parachurch organizations where a Christian can serve well; and a small group meeting in a home provides excellent opportunity for fellowship. Really, when you get right down to it, what good is a hidebound, outdated thing like the church? And why should I be a part of one?

The answer, to put it simply, is that the church isn’t just an invention of Christians who were trying to fulfill certain needs—fellowship, teaching, and so on. It’s much more than that. In fact, the Bible seems to hold the local church out as a unique organization, one unlike any parachurch organization, any other ministry, or any other institution in the world. It is, by Jesus’s own royal prerogative, the embassy of the kingdom of heaven to this rebellious world. This reality is mostly lost on Christians today, and yet that’s essentially how the Bible describes it.

Constituted, Chartered, Commissioned

Do you remember when the church was established in the Bible? It wasn’t in the book of Acts, though that’s what many people guess. It was during the ministry of Jesus himself, when Peter became the first person to recognize Jesus for who he really is—“the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Matt. 16:16). When Peter made that confession, it was as if the troop ships had landed, and the King’s counterinvasion of a rebellious world began in earnest. Jesus immediately told Peter that, upon this rock—that is, upon him as the first to confess Jesus’s true identity, and later upon all those who would recognize Jesus in like manner—he would build his church, his “assembly,” and the gates of hell would not prevail against it.

Then, just as a king would do for an ambassador, Jesus gave that church the right to speak with his authority. That’s what he meant when he said the church would hold the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and that whatever it bound or loosed on earth would be bound or loosed in heaven (Matt. 16:19; cf. 18:18). In effect, Jesus was giving his church a royal charter of authority; it and it alone would be his embassy on the earth. Finally, he commissioned it with a charge that, until he returned, that embassy was to be about the work of proclaiming his gracious kingship and making disciples of all nations (Matt. 28:18–20).

The church, then, wasn’t the idea of a bunch of pastors who wanted some job security. It was Jesus’s idea. He constituted it, he chartered it, and he commissioned it; and now the church plays a grand and unique role in God’s plan of salvation. That’s why Paul could say in Ephesians 3:10 that it is “through the church” that God’s “manifold wisdom” is going to be made known to the universe. It’s not primarily through parachurch organizations, ministries, or podcasts, Paul says, but through the church that God is carrying out his purpose of glorifying himself.

Looking to Scripture, Not the Fitness Club

If that’s true, then it’s no wonder Paul expects every believer in Jesus—everyone who, like Peter, understands who Jesus is and relies on him for salvation—to be a vital, committed part of a local church. Sometimes people shy away from the words “church member,” as if membership is a concept foreign to Scripture, something the church ripped off from a fitness gym or something. But the fact is, “membership” is right at the heart of the Bible’s description of the church. It’s a concept having to do with the body, which is arguably the Bible’s most important way of describing the church and its life. Just as an arm or a leg is a vital member of a body, so Paul says to the local church in Corinth, “Now you are the body of Christ, and individually members of it” (1 Cor. 12:27). To be a member of a local church is to be vitally connected to it, to feel what it feels, to contribute to its life, to be a part of it in a fundamental and even intimate way. That is something God expects of every Christian, and the benefits are amazing.

In Ephesians 4, just after saying it’s through the church that God is showing his glory to the world, Paul says that through life in the local church we all are maturing in the faith of Jesus, growing up to the full measure of the fullness of Christ (Eph. 4:13). That’s what life in a healthy church does. But how?

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