The Body of Christ

The Church is the Body of Christ. It is a living, breathing manifestation of His presence on Earth. When the unbelieving people of the world look at the Church, it is essential that they clearly see our living Savior. Through the Church, they must experience His love, His peace, and His joy. They must be touched by His healing hands and convicted by His living truth.

During His time on earth, there was nothing in Jesus’ physical appearance that attracted people to Him. His followers were attracted by His absolute devotion to His Father, by His selfless compassion for God’s children, and by His courage to speak God’s truth boldly and without reservation. If the Church is to be a light to the world we must shine like Jesus shines. It must be obvious to the world that the Church represents absolute devotion to God, selfless compassion for others, and boldness to speak God’s truth.

It is tempting to think of the Church as a social club rather than as Christ’s presence on Earth, and it is tempting to judge the “success” of the Church in the same way we judge the success of worldly institutions. To the world, a club exists for the benefit of its members. Successful clubs are large and unsuccessful ones are small; successful clubs have aesthetically pleasing facilities and unsuccessful clubs have shabby facilities; successful clubs present a professional and polished appearance and unsuccessful clubs look like amateur productions. The trick to building a successful club is no secret: identify the desirable members and then market to them, providing services and programs that will induce them to join the organization.

The Church so often falls prey to this worldly pattern of thinking. We design our worship services to be pleasing to ourselves and to those members we are trying to attract because successful clubs are member-oriented. We build ornate Church buildings, plush auditoriums and well-decorated educational wings because aesthetically pleasing structures are appealing to members and visitors and are the marks of a successful institution. We hire trained people to plan and lead our worship services and we purchase expensive audio/visual equipment because polished and professional performances are expected of successful institutions.

Congregations, like individuals, can be guilty of materialism, an ungodly focus on physical appearances and on worldly standards of success. For the most part, large congregations have been guiltier of this than small churches, and it is usually possible for Christians who tire of the growing materialism in the Church to escape to a simpler, smaller, “less successful” congregation somewhere else in town. However, even small congregations often succumb to the same temptations as their larger sisters.

The temptation begins when the small congregation’s members and leaders accept the world’s lie and equate their small size and relatively shabby appearance with failure. They reason that their congregation is small or shrinking because they have not provided enough member services to meet the needs of the members who chose to leave and because they have not done enough to make the congregation appealing to visitors. They look at the “success” of the large congregations with a veiled envy and make attempts to emulate the services and programs of the larger congregations in an effort to swell their own ranks. They hire more local ministers, try to make the worship service more polished and more appealing to the members, and give the old church building a little more curb appeal.

The drive to correct the perceived failure is certainly carried out with the best of intentions. The leaders and members of the small congregation want with all their hearts to glorify God and to expand His kingdom here on Earth, and they put their best efforts into doing so. And often their efforts are rewarded. The membership begins to grow, the grounds become more visually appealing, and the activities of the congregation develop a more polished appearance. The congregation can then give themselves a pat on the back for doing the Lord’s work by expanding God’s kingdom. For certainly, they reason, if there are more people in the pews on Sunday then the Lord’s work is being done.

What is sometimes overlooked is the fact that physical and aesthetic changes to the grounds and to the worship service do little more than attract Christian believers who are just looking for a new Church home. They are the religious equivalent of increasing the congregation’s market share of the existing pool of Christian believers in the area, but offer nothing in the way of showing Christ to the world or reaching out to the lost.

Surely such superficial changes can play no role in an unbeliever’s decision to commit his life to Christ, and if so, he is being misled about what a life in Christ is really all about. If the Church expects unbelievers to be drawn to her pews by an attractive building or by a flashy, polished, multi-media worship experience, then the Church is selling the wrong product. The fact that congregations selling this product are overflowing their multi-million dollar facilities is irrelevant. Any local social club that appeals to the desires of its members is going to draw a crowd, and that crowd is going to continue demanding more and more member-oriented amenities because that is why they came in the first place. But just because a congregation is large and “successful” in the eyes of the world does not mean that it is doing the will of the Lord or even expanding his kingdom.

The Church does not need the world to tell her how to reach out to the lost; Christ has already made that perfectly clear. The Church is the body of Christ, and as such she must display His love, His peace, His joy, and His glory just as Christ did during his time on earth. If a congregation is really exemplifying the person of Christ in everything it does, then unbelievers will be drawn by the love of Christ. To attempt to draw people into the body of Christ by an appeal to aesthetics is to deny the attractiveness of the person of Christ himself. If unbelievers are not attracted to the Church, it is not because our auditoriums are drab or our song leaders are uninspiring; it is because the Church is failing in its primary purpose of showing Christ to the world. Just as Christ did, so we must also demonstrate to the world an absolute devotion to our Father, a selfless compassion for God’s children, and the courage to boldly answer the materialism of the world with a radical, living profession of the Lordship of Christ.