Seeing the Invisible Church

The 'invisible Church' is the Church as God sees it, the united body of believers which stretches beyond all boundaries of class, race, nationality, gender, denomination because we are all united in the person of Christ.

And yet when we look around today the one true Church, united in the body of Jesus, lies in tatters- divided into more than thirty thousand separate denominations. We have perverted the wonderful image of a united church defined by a shared love of Christ and turned it into a collection of organisations characterised by an idolatrous love of doctrine.

By this I mean when our zeal for right doctrine (which, of course, is a wonderful thing), leads us to forget that we are called first to “love our neighbour as ourselves”. It is idolatry if we place a desire for knowledge about God in front of knowing and obeying God. We were taught that it is love that is to define the Christian's life and that it is the love of one another that will mark us out as different in the world (John 13:35). If we love a brother in Christ then we should be able to look to what unites us, ignoring that which divides us. If we only love those who agree with us, what credit is it to us? Jesus says as much in Luke 6:32- “If you love those who love you, what benefit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them”; on the contrary, we are called to “walk in love as Christ loved us”(Eph 5:2). If our desire for correctness blinds us to our primary calling- to love each other, I think there is the very real possibility that we may end up be wrong in our hearts while being right in our doctrine.

This blog, though, is not designed to criticise the global church as it stands today but to encourage us to look beyond the labels we place on people and the signs which stand in front of churches to see, within them all, the invisible Church, the way God sees it.

We do not follow Appollos, or Paul, Peter or Pope Benedict, Luther or Calvin, John Piper, J.I. Packer, Rob Bell, Mark Driscoll or anyone else we care to mention. We follow Christ. When we do that rightly we will begin to view our brothers and sisters in the Church around us differently. When we realise that what hurts one part of the body, hurts the whole (see 1 Cor 12:26), and that Jesus loves each and every individual in the Church so much that he was willing to die for them, that shouldn't leave us unchanged.

The Church is not a building or an organisation; but the united body of believers in Christ. This is the so called invisible church. We should strive to make the invisible, visible. Because the love we have for one another stands as the ultimate testimony about what Christ has done in this world. This church is more permanent and more beautiful than bricks and mortar could ever be- so let's start showing it to the world.

“By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John13:35)