What is the purpose of the Church?

Question 09046.

The church exists for reasons that Scripture states plainly, and yet ask a dozen churchgoers what those reasons are and you will get a dozen answers, most of them about what the church does for them. That is not a cynical observation. It is what happens when a congregation stops asking the question and starts running on habit, which every congregation does eventually unless somebody keeps raising it.

So let me raise it. Not what the church does, which any noticeboard will tell you, but what it is for. If we could not answer that, everything else we did would be activity without direction.

Why Asking What the Church Exists For Matters

A congregation that has lost its purpose does not usually close. It carries on, often for decades, doing the things it has always done with a diminishing sense of why. The services happen, the accounts balance, the fabric committee meets, and nobody can quite say what any of it is aiming at. That is a sadder state than closure, because it looks like health from the outside.

The New Testament does not leave us guessing. It gives the church a mandate in the closing verses of Matthew, a description of its first practice in Acts 2, and a purpose statement in Ephesians 4. Between those three passages you have a fairly complete account of what the church exists to do.

I find it useful to say that the church exists for four things: worship of God, formation of believers, care of one another and witness to the world. Everything a healthy congregation does will sit under one of those headings, and anything that sits under none of them is worth examining.

The Church Exists to Worship God

Put worship first, because everything else is derivative. Ephesians 1 says three times that we were chosen, redeemed and sealed to the praise of His glory. That is the stated end. The church exists, before it exists for anything else, to give God what He is worth.

This is why I am wary of the language of church as a service provider. Worship is not a warm-up for the sermon and it is not a mood-setting exercise for the congregation’s benefit. When Paul tells the Colossians to let the word of Christ dwell in them richly, teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, he ties singing directly to the word and directs it towards God with thankfulness in the heart.

A practical test follows. If the songs your church sings could be sung about almost anyone, if the pronoun you and the pronoun He are interchangeable, something has slipped. Worship that has stopped naming God is worship that has forgotten why the church exists.

The Church Exists to Make Disciples

The commission is to make disciples, and it has two participles hanging on it: baptising and teaching them to observe all that Jesus commanded. Note that it is not to make converts. A convert is the beginning of a disciple, not a finished product, and a church that counts decisions but does not teach obedience has done half a job and called it whole.

Ephesians 4:11-12 says the ascended Jesus gave gifted people to the church to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body. That order is worth sitting with. Leaders are not given so that they can do the ministry while everyone watches. They are given to equip everyone else to do it.

This is where the church exists in tension with consumer instincts. Discipleship is slow, personal and inconvenient. It happens in kitchens and cars and hospital corridors as much as in the pulpit, and it cannot be scaled up without losing the thing that made it work. On what expository preaching contributes to this, see my article on expository preaching.

The Church Exists for Fellowship That Costs Something

Acts 2:42 lists four devotions of the first congregation, and the second is fellowship, koinonia. The word means participation, having something in common, sharing in a joint enterprise. It is a long way from a cup of tea after the service, though the tea is not nothing.

Look at what follows in the text. They sold possessions and distributed to any who had need. Fellowship in Acts had a financial dimension, a practical dimension and a daily dimension. These people were in and out of each other’s homes.

The dozens of one another commands in the New Testament describe what this looks like: love one another, bear one another’s burdens, forgive one another, encourage one another, confess your sins to one another. Not one of them can be obeyed by a person who attends anonymously and leaves promptly. The church exists as a body precisely because these commands require bodies in the same room.

The Church Exists to Bear Witness

We are described as ambassadors, as though God were making His appeal through us, and as a people for His own possession that we might proclaim the excellencies of Him who called us out of darkness. Witness is not a department of the church’s life; it is one of the reasons the church is left here at all.

If evangelism were not part of the purpose, there would be no obvious reason for believers to remain on earth after conversion. We would be better off taken straight to glory. The fact that we are left here, in a world that does not know God, with a message it needs to hear, tells you something about why the church exists in its present form.

And witness is corporate before it is individual. Jesus said the world would know we are His disciples by our love for one another. A congregation whose members visibly care for each other is making an argument that no individual testimony can make on its own.

What the Church Does Not Exist For

It is worth naming the substitutes, because they are all plausible. The church does not exist primarily to preserve a building, however beautiful and however much it cost our grandparents. It does not exist to maintain a denomination, a tradition or a style of service. It does not exist to be a community centre with religious decoration, and it does not exist to reform society through political pressure.

I say that last one carefully, because I do believe the church has a prophetic voice and Christians should be engaged citizens. What I do not believe is that the church’s mission is to build the kingdom by legislation. We are proclaiming the King until He comes, which is a different job with a different measure of success.

Nor does the church exist to meet every felt need of everyone who walks through the door. Some needs the church can meet. Some belong to other agencies. A congregation that tries to be everything will end up doing the one thing only it can do badly, and only the church preaches the gospel.

Testing Your Own Congregation

Here is how I would examine a church, including my own. Take the four purposes and ask, honestly, what proportion of our energy, money and calendar goes to each. Most struggling churches are not neglecting all four. They are doing one or two well and quietly ignoring the rest.

A congregation strong on teaching and weak on fellowship produces well-informed strangers. One strong on fellowship and weak on teaching produces a warm club with no backbone. One strong on witness and weak on discipleship produces converts who drift away within eighteen months. One strong on worship and weak on witness turns inward and slowly ages out.

The church exists to hold all four together, which is difficult, and which is why leadership matters. If you want a fuller checklist, my article on the marks of a true church works through the diagnostic questions in more detail.

Ordering the Four Rightly

If the church exists for four things, the order between them is worth thinking about, because a congregation under pressure will always sacrifice something. My conviction is that worship comes first and witness comes last, not in importance but in sequence. A body that knows who God is will teach its people properly, and people taught properly will care for one another, and a caring congregation will be believable when it speaks to the town.

Reverse the order and it does not work. Churches that begin with witness, organising outreach before they have anything much to say, tend to produce activity and little fruit. Churches that begin with fellowship become warm and inward. The church exists in a particular direction, from God outwards, and getting the sequence wrong quietly changes what is being offered. Ephesians 1:12 puts the praise of God’s glory at the end of the chain of salvation for good reason.

This also answers the question of what to cut when resources are thin, which every small congregation faces. Cut programmes before you cut prayer. Cut buildings before you cut teaching. A church that has stopped feeding its people in order to keep a hall open has forgotten why the church exists, however sensible the decision looked at the time.

So, now what?

Do not read this as material for criticising your church from the back row. Read it as a description of what you have been joined to and what your part in it is. The church exists as a body, and a body part that observes rather than functions is not healthy, whatever it thinks of the rest of the organism.

So pick one. If your congregation is thin on fellowship, invite somebody to your table this month. If it is thin on witness, name one person you will pray for and speak to. If your own worship has become mechanical, come early and sit quietly before the service and remember who you are singing to. Which of the four is God pressing on you as you read this?

And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ.

Ephesians 4:11-12 (ESV)