Question: What is the Church, and what are the churches ? What is the essential nature of a 'New Testament” church?
Do we have in the New Testament a clearly defined blueprint of the Church? What is its order, constitution, methods and work? Is there a concise and proven system which is ready for copying and reproducing everywhere?
The answer is: No!
But if your question is: Is there in the New Testament a revelation of
God's mind as to the Church, in its nature, constitution, and vocation?
The answer is: certainly, Yes!
It is possible to take parts of the New Testament, such as doctrines,
practices, work, methods, and order, and piece them together and to
frame them into a system to be adopted and applied.
This is the mechanical or 'religious' method of “church”. The religious method of church building is capable of an almost endless variety of presentations which results in a very large variety of organized bodies with every one of them claiming the New Testament as its authority. The consequence of the religious method is that it produces rivalries, competitiveness, and controversy and most assuredly does not convey God's desired expression of Christ to the world.
As a result, there is a good deal of dissatisfaction and unrest among many sincere believers and servants of God, due largely to the poor or even bad state existing in so many churches. Many complain of spiritual starvation, and still many more are tired of mere formalism and spiritual death. There always has been and always will be faults and weaknesses in churches therefore there really is a need for reconsideration and a recovery of the essential nature and function of the Church.
With this in mind, the New Testament has within it a revelation which is precise, definite, and full, as to God's mind in all matters of the Church's constitution and vocation. What is that revelation? The answer is that it is not a system, but a Person. If you prayerfully study and consider the birth of the Early Church, you will see that anything that came into being under the Holy Spirit's activity was the result of a seeing of Christ. It is a seeing of the immense significance of Jesus in the eternal and universal order of God’s ultimate intention.
The believers gathered in the upper room saw Him in the light of eternity. They began to see that, while He was the glorified, personal, Son of God, He was Himself the embodiment of a great, a vast heavenly and spiritual order. This SEEING was absolutely revolutionary. It was a crisis out of which a new world and a new creation were born.
The Apostles did not convene a committee in order to fashion a strategic enterprise or a missionary organization. The might, energy and urge of the Holy Spirit within produced a Way and an order which was unintended by them and always to their own surprise. What was happening was really that Christ was taking form within them, individually and corporately, by new birth and growth. The believers and the companies were becoming an expression of Christ. Here, we come upon the essential nature of the Christian life and the Church.
In the thought of God, for what purpose do Christians exist? For what purpose does the Church exist? Why do local churches exist? There is only one answer. The existence and the function is to be an expression of Christ. There is nothing less and nothing more than that. Christ is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, and all between! That is the starting-point and governing rule in ALL MATTERS of Church life and vocation.
This vast, incomprehensible heavenly system, of which Christ is the personal embodiment, touches every detail of life, personally and collectively. Yet, only the Holy Spirit sees and knows how it is so. Therefore, there must be an utter submission to and direction by the Lordship of the Holy Spirit. What the blood-stream is to the human body, the Divine life is to 'the Church which is His body'. What the nerve system is in the physical realm, the Holy Spirit is in the spiritual. Understand all the workings of those two systems in the natural, and you begin to see how God has written His great heavenly principles, first in the person of His Son, and then in His corporate Body.
Just as an individual believer is the result of a conception, a formation, and a birth by the will of God, so, also is a true local church. It is a reproduction of Christ by the Holy Spirit. Man cannot make, form, produce or, 'establish' this. Neither can anyone 'join' or 'enroll', or make himself or herself a member of this organism.
So, all talk about 'forming New Testament churches' is nonsense. The beginning is in a seeing of Christ, and when two or three in one place have seen Him by the Holy Spirit, and have been "begotten again by the word of God", there is the genesis of a local church.
That is the starting-point of an accurate, New Testament Church. We must stop looking at religious systems and traditions of men. We must gaze beyond the existing Church and churches and look again, long and earnestly, at Christ! To see Him by the Spirit is to see the Church.
In summation:
1. The objective approach to the New Testament, with a view to formulating a pattern to be imitated, copied, and reproduced as 'New Testament churches', is wrong. It only either leads to a variety of conclusions, and therefore 'denominations' or results in something fixed, static and legalistic. This in turn leads to rivalries, suspicions, fears of 'sheep-stealing' and loss of 'members', etc.
2. The origin of the Church and of local churches, was a Holy Spirit revelation of Christ. As truly as Jesus said: "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father", so truly, the New Testament teaches that he that has seen Christ has seen the Church: for, although Christ retains His personality, individuality and distinctive identity, the Church is His corporate expression.
The true recognition of the Church is a revolutionary event in that it can emancipate from all merely traditional, historical and earthly systems: as seen in the lives of the Apostles and especially Paul.
3. The Church was not formed by any conference, convocation, organization, council or plan.
The Church, and likewise the churches, were BORN. A living seed - the truth concerning Jesus, in the power of the Holy Spirit - was deposited. The Word and the Spirit, united with the quickened spirit of believers, formed an embryo, and this produced an organism. The whole process was biological as opposed to mechanical. "Not of blood (bloods), nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God" (John 1:13). The Church, and any true church, is as much a birth by the action of the Holy Spirit as is any true child of God. "Two or three" in Christ is a local-church nucleus.
4. The function and vocation of the Church, and of the churches, is to bring Christ into any location on this earth. The only test of a true church is that of whether, and how much of Christ is found, met with, and ministered THERE. Anything and everything that does not truly bring Christ in, or minister to His increase, has no place in a true church.
IN PURPOSE AND NATURE the Church IS Christ, and so are the churches locally - no more, no less,
The Church
