Articles
The Church in Two Senses
“THE CHURCH IN TWO SENSES”
The following article is adapted from F.D. Srygley, who was front-page editor of the Gospel Advocate from 1889-1900. He wrote a lot over these years about the problems of denominational divisions, and about the Bible view of what the New Testament church is. It will exercise your reading “muscles”, but it is good material to stimulate our thinking, and much needed today. I have reworded some sections for the sake of brevity and clarity. These are printed in italics. Bold emphasis is mine. lw]
The word “church” is used in two senses in the New Testament. Sometimes it means the congregation of disciples which comes together on the first day of the week to break bread and engage in other acts of public worship (Acts 20:7; Rom 16:5; 1 Cor 16:19); sometimes it means the general spiritual body over which Jesus is the head and in which every Christian is a member (Mt 16:18; Col 1:18-24; Eph 1:22). In this general sense, the word is sometimes limited by a geographical term, as, “the church of God which is at Corinth” (1 Cor 1:2); “So the church throughout all Judea and Galilee and Samaria had peace” (Acts 9:31, Revised Version). In this general sense, the church is not a denominational institution composed of a sisterhood of local churches “of the same faith and order,” but a spiritual body composed of all Christians in the region defined by the geographical term of limitation, without any general denominational organization.
In the sense of a congregation of disciples which comes together on the first day of the week, no one of these congregations lives up to the divine standard of what a church should be, just as no individual lives up to the divine standard of what a Christian should be... It is difficult to find two Christians in exactly the same grade of spiritual growth and developing at precisely the same rate of spiritual progress. It is no less difficult to find two churches equally near to the divine standard of spiritual perfection and approaching it at exactly the same measure of growth in the grace and knowledge of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ…
God recognized all these things in the arrangement of the Christian system, and left a wide margin for the free play of individuality in both Christians and churches. On the New Testament basis of individual activity and personal consecration in and through independent churches, the development of individual Christian character and the growth of an independent church are unhampered by the restraints of general denominational institutions or ecclesiastic organizations. [Please read that again and think about it. We are to measure ourselves against the divine ideal, not other men or “the brotherhood” of congregations. See 2 Cor 10:12,13. lw]
But when local congregations are massed into denominational sisterhoods of churches “of the same faith and order,” the divine standard and model are lost sight of, and the energies of both churches and individual Christians are bent to the attainments of the denominational standard… In such cases the standard is erected and the model is set for both the individual Christian and the congregation of worshipers by the predominant sentiment of the denomination. The effect is the same, no matter whether that sentiment is codified in a written creed, as in “the method of the Methodists,” or left unwritten, as in the authoritative restraints of “Baptist usage” among the Baptists, and the inviolate limitations of “our plea” among the Disciples. In either case, individual character and conduct, as well as congregational organization and procedure, is measured by denominational standards. What it takes to constitute a Methodist is determined by one standard, and what it takes to make a Disciple is determined by an entirely different standard…
A man can be a Christian without belonging to either a Methodist church or a Disciple church, and a congregation of worshipers can be a church of Christ without going into the denominational organization of either the Methodists or the Disciples, or connecting itself in any way with any kind of denominational federation or sisterhood of churches “of the same faith and order.”
When new denominations are formed, in the beginning there is a gush of zeal and consecration, and a high standard of faith and practice. But the natural and inevitable result is the drifting of the standard toward the general average of the party, and in each generation this standard drifts lower, toward spiritual stagnation. There is no “church association” standard of this kind in the New Testament.
On the contrary, God, by inspiration and revelation in the New Testament, has set before each Christian and each congregation of worshipers as spiritual model of faultless perfection, and left no denominational standards or institutions to come, with soothing effect, between either the individual Christian or the congregation of worshipers and the standard of absolute spiritual perfection. [There God left it, and there each of us stands as individual saints before Him. And there we stand before Him as a single, autonomous local church, regardless of how “the brotherhood” drifts, lw.]
New Testament churches, as well as individual Christians, were measured by the divine standard and graded according to their individual merits. See the first three chapters of Revelation.
- The_Church_in_Two_Senses.doc (65.54 kB)
