We Need the Church
The church is the second most foundational source of truth that can make us wise. Some might scratch their heads at this, especially in post-Christian Western cultures where the church feels unnecessary and irrelevant at best. Can’t we have Jesus without the church, adopting some aspects of spirituality without institutional religion? Aren’t churches prone to anti-intellectual foolishness, fundamentalist bigotry, and abuses of power? The list is long for arguments against the church as a vital part of our lives that reliably points us toward wisdom.
Nevertheless, I’ve seen in my own life—and in the lives of many others—that the church can be an indispensable source of stability and growth; a treasure trove of communal and Spirit-infused wisdom that we’d be foolish to neglect. The church, the people of God, is second only to the Bible, the Word of God, as a source of reliable and transformative wisdom. Especially in our unwise age, attaching oneself to the church—the global, growing, two-thousand-plus-years-old body of Jesus Christ on earth—can be like finding a lighthouse when you’re lost in a raging sea. A faithful, Christ-centered church and its wisdom-infusing patterns of worship is increasingly a refuge for those being pummeled by the maelstrom of our digital era.