In the post-Christian, postsecular Global North, people inside and outside of Christian communities look around and observe shrinking membership in churches across the denominational spectrum. Christians and non-Christians alike notice the world keeps on turning even as their local churches dwindle, consolidate, or close. They see the intensifying polarization and politicization of Christian commitments. They identify abuses of pastoral and political power by church leaders. They note the increasing social and cultural marginalization of institutions. They perceive that abuse and demagoguery make some churches unsafe. Others, offering little more than the anodyne platitudes of moralistic therapeutic deism, fail to provide the substantial nourishment of the Christian gospel.[1] Even those with a nominal Christian upbringing or inclination sometimes question why they should affiliate with a church. In their view, any spiritual impulse they have could be pursued just as well—or better—outside of a church. All of this leads many to ask, “Who needs church?”
For some, asking “Who needs church?” reflects a justified crisis of confidence in Christianity. For others, it stems from sincere curiosity, wary suspicion, or dismissive condescension. But for everyone who questions, it is crucial that we find a clear and forthright answer. Doing so will help align our ecclesial life and practice with a sober vision of what church can and should be. This is especially urgent in the highly pluralistic and individualistic culture of the postindustrial Global North.
Inquiring into the Need: Context and Meaning
Answering the question “Who needs church?” in a meaningful way has to begin by asking it in context. That means reckoning with the reality that being a full member of North American society no longer requires possessing a Christian identity rooted in ecclesial belonging. In previous eras, membership in the “right” church was often required for elite social, economic, and political status in certain communities. That has almost entirely disappeared.
It means contending with the fact that the Enlightenment prediction that increased education would lead to decreased religiosity, particularly in the public sphere, was wrong. Instead, fundamentalisms of various degrees and types have not simply reclaimed their voice in civil society but have demanded sovereignty over it. Moreover, the Christian form of this impulse often combines with its long history of exploitation. This has made it hard for many observers to differentiate Christianity from oppression, neocolonialism, or white nationalism.
It means facing the implications of consumer capitalism. This all-pervasive ideology construes everything, including religious commitment, as a commodity to be marketed and packaged, bought and sold. It manufactures not only goods but also the desire to possess them. It then presents this acquisitive materialism as a positive virtue. Pursuing it is the way we supposedly fill the void that the system itself has produced in us. Moreover, in late capitalism, consumers are offered products that are highly customizable, often with on-demand delivery. This reinforces the cultural centrality of the individual. It also disguises that individuals are not subjects in a straightforward market exchange. They are the objects of sophisticated technological programs designed to algorithmically farm consumers, not only for money but also for time and attention.
It means grappling with the fact that we live in a highly pluralistic society. Our neighborhood is no longer limited by driving distance but by the speed of our modem. And the differences between us and our neighbors are somehow more pronounced than ever before while also being flattened out, as we paradoxically come to conceive of others as being “just like me.”
It means contending with hyperindividualism. This cultural trait is rooted in the mythic ideal of the self-made, self-actualized subject of unconstrained liberty. The identities of those who live in Western democratic and economic systems are based on this hyperindividualistic myth. This is the same hyperindividualism, of course, that does not actually seem to produce liberty.
It means taking into account a society that prizes technological advance as the highest good. This society demeans labor and the arts. It seeks to extract as much value as possible from those endeavors while granting as little of it as possible to those who actually perform them. Exceptions are extended to high-status, high-paying jobs, such as professional athlete, blue-chip artist, A-list actor, and other celebrities. These are not considered jobs, however, but “lifestyles” to be marketed on social media by “influencers.” One must have a “personal brand” to sell. The content of that brand is virtually irrelevant. In the influencer economy, one’s ultimate success relies less on having a product to sell than on the ability to literally sell one’s life as a product.
And so, a meaningful answer to the question “Who needs church?” must acknowledge the reality that any church today will be situated in a context marked (at least) by these extremely potent sociocultural currents. It is also important to be clear what is meant by need here.
Asking “Who needs church?” is not to ask who might benefit from its presence, as in “This batter needs vanilla” or “This upholstery needs updating.” Nor is it to ask who might have a deep desire for it, as in “The dog needs to go out” or “They need to go home for their sibling’s wedding.” It is not wrong to think that church provides certain kinds of benefits to certain constituencies. Neither is it wrong to think that church answers to particular sorts of longing that it truly can fulfill. These are reasonable views that can be affirmed theologically, historically, and even, to a limited extent, psychologically and sociologically. But they are secondary senses of need for Christian community.
There is a primary, more fundamental sense of what need indicates for our purposes. This is need in the sense of something required for a thing to be what it is or to do what it is meant to do. This is the kind of need expressed in statements such as “Fish need water” and “Green plants need sunlight.” Here, then, to ask “Who needs church?” is to ask “Who needs church in order to be what they are?” Is there anyone who requires some form of church to be who they are or what they are supposed to be? If there is, what does that reveal about church itself?
Does God Need Church?
Is the triune God whom Christians worship dependent on that worship or on the existence of a Christian community in order to be who God is? Of course, to ask this is in some ways absurd. God is, in the words of the Nicene Creed, “maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.” All things, then, owe their existence to God. God does not require there to be anything God has made in order to be who God is.
Church is a creature, not an entailment of the creator. Christianity has always maintained that God incarnate, Jesus the Christ, inaugurated Christian community. Some maintain that he established it directly. Others hold, more plausibly, that he founded it indirectly. For them, church is the continuation of the mission that Jesus preached and enacted. This corporate activity, empowered by the Holy Spirit, makes Christ present in and as that community. Yet, this does not mean God needs this community to be God. Similarly, God does not need the enslaved Hebrews through whom God reveals Godself to the nations to be God (see Deut. 7:6 and Isa. 60:3). God may need the Jewish people and Christian communities to the extent that they were and remain covenanted instruments through which God blesses the world. God may need them to the extent that they reveal the divine identity, purpose, and promise to the world. God may need them in the sense that God loves and preserves them. But God does not need them in the primary sense. They are not required for God to be God.
Why belabor this obvious point? Because even if few Christians would claim God depends on Christian community to be God, many Christians act as if that is exactly the case. There are approaches to ecclesial life in which the predominant goal is to “do church right.” This can entail hypervigilance about worshipping a certain way. It can lead to fiercely defending particular traditions against change. It can result in uncritically maintaining received institutional forms. It can instigate safeguarding congregational purity by withdrawing from the pollutions of the wider world. Such projects imply that doing this upholds the integrity of God’s holiness and fulfills divine expectation. This mistaken (and rather self-important) belief results in actions that shift the spotlight from what is most critical about being church to church itself. The obsession with doing church correctly makes church its own end. Christian community, however, does not exist for its own sake any more than it does for God’s sake. God does not need churches to be God. Acting as if God needs churches turns church into its own reason for being. It twists it too much back in on itself. Living incurvatus in se in that way is consonant with an orientation to sin, not to holiness.
Does the World Need Church?
It is empirically true that the world does not need Christian communities to be the world. Church, as a historical phenomenon, obviously postdates not only creation but human civilization. Theologically, world can be defined as the globe, human social history or some component of it, or the entire cosmos. We cannot reasonably claim that any of these need church to be itself. What we almost certainly must claim, however, is that the world can benefit from Christian community. We can also claim that it may even long for what church—at its best—offers, if we qualify that claim carefully and narrowly.
We can reasonably say the world needs church in that it can benefit and has benefitted from acts of love, service, and charity rooted in ecclesial groups. Such efforts range from the simplicity of a local food pantry to the complexity of a multinational health or human services NGO. They include both a small congregation’s involvement in a broad-based community organization and a massive church advocacy group’s advancement of human rights before an international body. None of this denies that churches have also been and still continue to be a cause of human misery. It merely demonstrates the ability of church, in some forms and modes, to respond to certain material needs of a world in distress. Governments and the private sector increasingly see this as outside of their purview. When churches see it as part of theirs, it is a welcome contribution to the general welfare of people and the planet.
We can also say the world needs church given the cultural context of the Global North we described above. Here, need in the sense of deep longing becomes relevant. From a Christian perspective, the social, cultural, political, and economic currents that characterize our context prevent the world from flourishing. Certainly, people want themselves and the world to flourish. Too often, however, that flourishing is pursued in order to benefit oneself or one’s group without sufficient regard for the common good. This ultimately results in less flourishing. The commitments animating ecclesial communities can impel Christians to actively resist and redirect those energies. The world needs church as a community of practice that can respond to a deep desire that the wider culture may not even be able to name.
Certainly, people other than Christians answer this need, as well. It is not necessary to be Christian to act in these ways or to provide direct service to those in distress. If the world can be said to need church in some way, it is not because the world needs church to be itself. Rather, it is because the world can benefit materially and ideologically by what Christian service and witness can provide. This is a need on the world’s part to be loved and served into a different and better state of affairs. The world needs, then, Christian mission of the Matthew 25 variety. It does not need theocracy. Church and world are distinct and have their own integrity. If the world needs church, it needs it for the love and service that communities bearing the name of Jesus of Nazareth are charged with providing.
Do Human Beings Need Church?
People do not require either Christianity or church affiliation to flourish as human beings. In our pluralistic world, friendships and partnerships across differences of faith commitment are likely and expected. Our neighbors of other faiths or no faith are genuine, loving partners in our most intimate relationships. They are thoughtful, productive, prosocial members of our societies. This demonstrates that church membership is not necessary for human beings to exhibit these qualities. Conversely, some Christians use their faith as cover for indulging in abusive, dehumanizing, and self-aggrandizing behavior. They promulgate conspiracy theories. They lie. They engage in political action ranging from various supremacisms to outright fascism. They perpetrate violence ranging from taking over school boards to the military invasion of nations. Ecclesial affiliation, therefore, is obviously no guarantee that a person will evince the qualities of a fully flourishing human life. Human beings do not need church to be what they are.
Yet, it could be said human beings need church in the subsidiary ways I said that the world does. As before, saying so requires careful qualification. We have to avoid leaving the impression that church somehow completes a person and that therefore only a baptized Christian is truly human. This is a recurring triumphalistic and ecclesiocentric pattern that connects church and human being in a manner that contributes to an inadequate cultural Christianity.
Human beings can benefit from ecclesial affiliation on account of the positive effects that social belonging of all kinds provide. Churches, though, like all religious groups, offer belonging of a different type than civic associations, nonprofit organizations, activist groups, or sporting leagues. They are specifically organized as communities of care. They are mutual aid societies, in which members involve themselves in each other’s lives in supportive, life-giving ways. These are, sadly, not common. Churches provide a durable, institutionally supported version of them for those attracted to that way of relating to others. Under the atomized conditions of our highly individualistic context, that churches serve people in this way is no small thing.
Human beings can also be said to need ecclesial affiliation if we think of participation in church life as providing self-transcendent existential meaning. Not every person is compelled to search for this. Moreover, those who do may find it someplace other than through involvement in Christian community. Even so, church can fulfill this important meaning-making function in some people’s lives. This is reason enough to make a spare and circumspect case for how human beings might be said to need church.
As before, these are instrumental rather than constitutive forms of need. Baptism into Christian community and ecclesial life is not a necessary component of full humanity. It is a vocation. Lay, ordained, and monastic life are vocations. Marriage and singleness are vocations. The overall allocation of one’s time and energy stems from a person’s fundamental vocational self-understanding. Ecclesial affiliation is included in this. By God’s grace, all are welcome to become members of the body of Christ. That not all will do so does not mean the nonaffiliated are any less human or capable of leading authentic, flourishing lives. Membership in Christian community may contribute to those conditions, but it is not required for them.
Only Christians Need Church
God, the world, and humanity can be said to need church to different degrees and in different ways. The sense of need employed here is limited. None of them needs church in the constitutional sense. God does not need church to be who God is. The world and human beings do not need church to be what they are. There is, however, a subset of human beings who actually do need church to be who they are: Christians. In a way that is not true of God, the world, or general humankind, Christians simply cannot be Christian without church. Ecclesial affiliation is required to make a person a Christian for at least three basic reasons.
Because Assembly Is a Core Christian Practice
The first Christians were the part of the Jewish community who gathered as a testimony to the lordship of Jesus of Nazareth, crucified and raised. They gathered to witness to the truth of the gospel he preached. In those gatherings, they figured out what it meant to be disciples of Jesus and of the apostles who formed and nurtured the churches in his name. They discovered it meant to love and serve God, one another, and the world. They baptized new members into that way of life. And they celebrated the ritual meal Jesus commanded his followers to observe. Gathering into communities of fellowship, service, and worship in this way has never been a mere element or component of Christian life or identity. It has always been and still is their constituting action.
The connection between assembly and identity runs deep in Jewish theological self-understanding. In translating the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek, the political term ekklēsía (ἐϰϰλησία, Latin ecclēsia) was used to render the Hebrew qahal (קהל). The qahal was the congregation or assembly of Israel, the Hebrew nation. The Greek ekklēsía was a decision-making body of Greek citizens. That the translators brought these two concepts together reflects the theological profile of the assembly. It was simultaneously a worshipping body, an institutional structure mandated by Torah, and a culture distinguished from others by special practices.
Corporate life as ekklēsía was how the specificity of Jewish identity was enacted and maintained. New Christian communities of Jews naturally carried this idea forward, which is why there was no need to replace the term ekklēsíawith another. Following Jesus brought about changes to the specifically Christian forms of assembly over time. Even so, assembling remained the essential constitutive act of religious identity and practice. Being Jews, the earliest Christ followers gathered as a distinct religio-cultural group that was governed by theological principles articulated and upheld by authorized leaders. They assembled to carry out specific worship and social practices consonant with those principles. Coming together in this way for these reasons still makes Christians who they are.
Liturgically speaking, baptism in the triune name and celebration of the Eucharist were from the beginning—and continue to be—the heart of Christian worship. They are the sacramental wellspring from which the life of the assembly flows. Baptism incorporates members into the congregation by ritual participation in Jesus’s death and resurrection. The baptized are theologically understood to have been raised to new life in Christ as members of his body, the church. The Eucharist recalls Christians to their baptismal identity and nourishes them by the living presence of Jesus through the power of the Holy Spirit. All of this occurs in the time of hopeful waiting for God to become All in all (see 1 Cor. 15:28). During this period, Christians are enjoined to follow the dual command of Jesus. This is to love God with the whole heart, mind, and strength and to love one’s neighbor as oneself (see Luke 10:27, Matt. 22:37–39, Mark 12:30–31). Theologically, neither baptism nor Eucharist are possible outside of the assembly. And it is the assembly that carries out in the world what its worship teaches. All of this makes sense given the Jewish provenance of the assembly we call church and also given that Christ’s presence is instantiated relationally (see Matt. 18:20).
Because Church Orients Christians to the Promises of God
Assembly for worship, service, and corporate life as a distinctive people dedicated to God is a reason Christians need church. To stop there, however, would be to make the gathering itself the focus. The community’s worship and service are offered to God, others, and the world in thanksgiving and devotion to God. But they do not happen for their own or God’s sake.
Church is more than its worship and service. Church is a people whose lives are organized around their corporate identity as the body of Christ. This identity is a gift of grace to Christians, given by God to Christ’s ecclesial body through the power of the Holy Spirit. Crucially, by this grace, Christians are oriented toward the ultimate good represented by the fulfillment of the promises of God. All other goods are ranked lower in value by comparison. This is an essential reason that the church is necessary for Christians.
I have argued extensively elsewhere about the promise of God revealed in the totality of the scriptural record. God’s character and purpose is supremely demonstrated in the birth, ministry, death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ. On this basis, the divine promise is seen to be the perfection of relational communion. This is a four-fold communion between God and humans, among and within human beings, and between us and the rest of God’s creation. Christians need church because in its proclamation, worship, and service, Christian community orients Christians toward this promise. It does this by rehearsing and provisionally manifesting and experiencing the eschatological flourishing promised in perfected communion. This occurs liturgically and through the other characteristic acts of church, both while gathered for worship and when dispersed in the world. Christians practice communion in and as Christian community. In this way, churches teach their members to desire the promised perfection of communion as the highest good. They train them to seek it ahead of any other. This happens precisely nowhere else. Christians need church to be formed this way. To be who they are, they require the eschatological orientation that church, and only church, provides.
This formation counters other formational pressures exerted upon people by virtue of membership in their home societies and cultures. It produces Christians who are, ideally, better able to resist uncritically absorbing culturally dominant influences. There are many such forces. One is the enthronement of the self, with its desires, perspectives, and personal experiences, as one’s highest authority. Another is the equation of liberalism with secularism, while another is its mirror image, the political co-optation of religion. Still one more is the sin of American exceptionalism and quasi-sectarian polarization. Another instance is the consumerist ideology that reduces everything, including faith, to a commodity. Examples could be multiplied. Christians need church to be Christian because to be Christian requires being “in Christ” in the Pauline sense. This entails being a corporate member of the one body that sets a question mark against one’s (supposed) individual interests. It means aligning with the one community that places the fullness of communion with God, others, self, and creation ahead of any other good.
Because Church Is How Christians Are the Body of Christ in and for the World
Baptism into the corporate body that is church and taking up the ecclesial vocation that flows from that transpersonal identity together constitute a Christian. A Christian is a member of the universal, transtemporal, and transspatial body of Christ. In concrete terms, this means Christians are affiliated with a local community of Christian disciples. The universal body is available only in and through discrete, particular bodies located in specific times and places. The eschatological promise of communion is relational. It is a promise that points the corporate body outward in love for and service to the world. Such service, offered in the spirit of truth and justice, becomes an open invitation to participate in the flourishing that God promises to creation. Christians need church because Christians are charged with being the body of Christ in and for the world, pointing toward that flourishing in love and service. Their incorporation into the baptized body of church, where teaching, prayer, and worship form them into the body of Christ, is required for this. It is what makes them who they are: Christians.
Here, we return to the other senses of need for church we saw where God, world, and humanity were concerned. Only Christians need church in the strong, constitutive sense. God, world, and humanity in general need church in weaker, more instrumental forms. Yet, it is precisely in the constitutional requirement of Christians to become the corporate body of Christ through Christian community that meeting those subsidiary needs becomes possible. Christians cannot be Christians without church. But this is precisely because being Christian means becoming an agent of God’s blessing of love and service to the world. Attending to people’s concrete material and spiritual needs invites them to participate in the inbreaking eschatological promise of true flourishing. The earthly Jesus of Nazareth did exactly this in his corporeal body. The spiritual body of the corporate Christ made concrete by the Holy Spirit through the conjoinment of particular Christian bodies continues doing as Jesus did.
Implications of the Christian Need for Church
Neither God, the world, nor humanity in general needs church to be itself. In fact, it’s the opposite: church needs God, the world, and humanity in order to be church. Enlivened by hope, Christians act in ways that point toward and provisionally manifest the perfection of eschatological communion. They try to embody communion between humans and God, among and within human beings, and between humans and the rest of creation. This represents the ultimate fulfillment of God’s promise to invest all creation with the perfect communion that God is (again, see 1 Cor. 15:28). They cannot do this without being a communion themselves. Being a Christian communion is possible only by becoming incorporated in—literally, “bodied into”—the body of Christ, which is church, Christian community.
Only Christians need church in the strong sense. Christians simply cannot be Christians without church. Ecclesial life is not optional or extra for Christian discipleship. It is required for it. The God whom Christians worship became a human body in Jesus. Jesus’s body was blessed and broken, brutalized and beatified. This created a means by which our bodies could be corporately remade into his body. As his body, we continue his mission of loving and serving the world toward its divinely intended flourishing. We tend to others’ broken bodies in our own individual bodies as his corporate body.
The Christian faith is thoroughly corporeal and relational. We cannot be Christian alone. We need what corporate formation, worship, and service provide: the vocational vision for and capacity to take up our baptismal ministry. This ministry is to participate in the work of enhancing communion in all its forms. We do this by prioritizing and pursuing that which leads to it. We name anything short of that as lesser goods and keep them in their proper place. And we relentlessly resist the forces that would divert or distract us from those essential tasks. Christian relational practices, being oriented to communion, differ from relational practices informed by other values and commitments. By living these practices within and as the body of Christ, Christians’ relational muscles are strengthened. This allows them to instantiate their love and service in and for the wider world.
“Who needs church?” God, the world, and humanity in general need church in limited, instrumental ways. God needs church to the extent that God ordains the corporate body of Christ to a vocation of love and service in and to a world God loves. The hurting world and the people in it need church in a secondary way. They need it to help address the material crises of suffering, oppression, and violence and the spiritual crises of meaninglessness and misdirected desire. But Christians need church constitutively. Christians need church to be who they are.
[1] The concept of moralistic therapeutic deism was coined by sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton in their book Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2005) to describe a common religious perspective among American young people, exclusive of actual religious affiliation or upbringing, marked by five basic precepts: (1) a divine power created all that is and watches over it; (2) this divine power wants people to be good and nice to each other; (3) this divine power wants people to be happy and self-confident; (4) there is no need to interact with this divine power unless one encounters a problem that needs solving; and (5) there is a heaven and good people go there when they die.