The Local Church: A Necessity, not an Option

If church planting and pastoral ministry has taught me anything about American cultural influence on the gospel, it has taught me that our gospel has been severely synchronized to the idol of individualism. This has been clearly illustrated to me time and time again by a numerous amount of Christians who have an out right disregard for the centrality of the local church in the lives of individual believers. They act as if belonging to a church is an option on par with belonging to a gym. Not so. When I speak to others on this subject you'll often here me give the following quote from Cyprian, often employed by Augustine and Calvin: "You cannot have God as your Father if you do not have the church as your mother."

I love this quote because it powerfully rattles the spines of lone ranger Christians who so carelessly cast off God's provision of the local church. Dr. David Calhoun, a professor at Covenant Theological Seminary, explains the meaning of this quote in one of his lectures in Ancient and Medieval Church History:

It has also been asked, what did Cyprian mean when he said that you cannot have God as your Father if you do not have the church as your mother? Cyprian and Augustine would always qualify that by saying, "ordinarily." I think they viewed some possibility of this not being true in rare cases. Generally, where there is the church a person must be part of that church to be a Christian. You cannot really be a Christian all by yourself. Part of the definition of what a Christian is is a person in fellowship with God's people on earth. So this was their way of discouraging any individual or private Christianity. Calvin also held that, but I think Calvin as well as Augustine thought it was possible -- possible -- for a person to be a Christian without being a church member, but not ordinarily. And it is certainly possible for church members not to be Christians. Calvin believed that, as did Augustine and probably Cyprian as well. This is a rather difficult quotation to understand, especially for us Protestants in the West. We Protestants tend to diminish the role of the church, to see it as not so important. I think that is a mistake. Then when we hear a quotation like this it startles us that you could say that you have to be a member of the church to have God as your Father. Of course, we may be thinking of being a member of a particular, local church, and that was true back then, too. But when there was one church you were either in the church or not in the church, and Christians were in the church.

You can find the entire transcript of the lecture here.