Should we ‘forget church, and just look at Jesus’?

In evangelism Christians have an incredible asset which too many think is a liability: the church.

Last month we considered the advertising campaign ‘He Gets Us’, and its tendency to pit a compassionate Jesus against His judgmental people. But it happens in personal conversations too. The failures of Christ’s people might come up, and the strong temptation can be to throw the church ‘under the bus’.

You know the kind of thing; somebody raises the subject of historical horrors (the Crusades, the Inquisition, Conquistadors), or institutional evils (child sexual abuse scandals and their cover-ups), or experiences closer to home (our friends’ own encounters with hypocritical Christians). There might simply be a vague feeling in the air – coming from your non-Christian friend, but maybe also from you! – that church is old-fashioned, or boring, or a cringe. In all these circumstances it is very common for the Christian to sharply distance themselves from the church: ‘Oh, that’s just churchianity. Nothing to do with Jesus. Forget the church. Look at Jesus.’

This is a mistake. It’s a mistake both theologically and practically. Theologically it’s a problem because Christ’s mission strategy is church. Let me point you to something I noticed only the other day.

In John’s writings there are two places he uses the exact same phrase: ‘No one has ever seen God.’ Here the Bible is addressing the ‘hiddenness of God’, a subject that is much discussed in apologetic circles. It’s at the heart of the great evangelistic challenge we face: people don’t know God, they can’t see Him, He doesn’t seem present to them. But John answers the question of divine hiddenness in two different ways.

Here’s how he finishes the sentence in John 1: ‘No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known’ (John 1:18, ESV). Here the answer to God’s hiddenness is Christ – the ‘one and only Son’, as the NIV puts it.

But in 1 John 4, there’s a different answer to hiddenness: ‘No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us’ (1 John 4:12).This is a second answer to the hiddenness of God: the church. ‘If we love one another’ something of God can be seen.

Didn’t Jesus say exactly that? ‘By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another’ (John 13:35), and when He prays for the unity of the church He gives the reason: ‘so that the world may believe that you have sent me… that they [the church] may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me’ (John 17:21-23).

God is made known in two ways: in Christ, and in the church. If we divorce the two and dismiss or deride the church we’ll find ourselves at odds with Christ Himself.

So theologically it’s a huge mistake to talk down the church, but also practically it’s a mistake. Because when people hear ‘forget the church, look at Jesus’ they actually believe us. And what do we get? In the UK people have an overwhelmingly positive view of Jesus and around 45% of Britons believe he rose from the dead (a finding from the 2015 and 2022 Talking Jesus survey). They’re not anywhere close to coming to church though. In the US, 40million Americans have left church this century, 30million of them have ‘casually de-churched’, meaning that they still believe in Jesus and the Bible but they no longer attend church. In other words, tens of millions of Christians have believed their own evangelism: ‘Forget church, just look to Jesus.’

Our evangelism is more effective than we think. Unfortunately it’s been effective in persuading Christians of a great untruth – that we can embrace the Head and spurn the Body. We can’t. Over the next few columns we’ll consider how to respond when church scandals are raised, but for now let’s resist the urge to say ‘forget the church’ when pointing to Jesus. The truth is that Jesus stands tall, pointing to His people, saying: ‘Behold my Bride’!