When is a church not a church?

Some "churches" are just beyond the pale.

We're scandalised by their false teaching, outraged by the way immorality and sin is tolerated and even applauded, and incensed at the way preachers make themselves the centre of attention.

Sadly the wreckage of apostate Christianity is all around us. From crumbling denominations to wild money-grabbing showmen who know how to turn on our attention and empty our pockets at the same time. And of course, like self-respecting Bible-believing evangelicals, we turn away in sadness, dismissal or rage. We distance ourselves from them as a disgrace to the gospel and as a poor advertisement for what faith in Jesus as Lord should look like.

Or should we…

We've had 1 Corinthians on our mind a lot over the last couple of weeks at the Good Book Company, as we have been working on the new Good Book Guides by Mark Dever. And we've been appalled afresh by what a disaster of a church it was in Corinth. Arrogant, obsessive and self-centered about gifts, drawn to the shallowly spectacular while ignoring the important central truths of the gospel, loveless, me-centred, now-centred and into all kinds of weird things to do with sex and marriage.

Just the kind of church, in fact, that we would run a mile from, and tell anyone who cared to ask that they weren't real Christians at all.

Except that Paul didn't. Nor the Lord Jesus.

It seems that our willingness to engage with aberrant forms of faith is, at times, far lower than the apostle, or the Lord. Faced with such a travesty of theology and malpractice, Paul did not turn his back and walk away, but prayed, pleaded, argued and taught. He wrote enormously long and passionate letters. he visited. He loved them, and longed to point out their errors and restore them to the truth. And faced with seven churches, only one of which seems to have been "OK", the Lord Jesus wrote to them through John, doing the same thing.

As one Christian brother put it: "If our standard of who we should fellowship with is higher than that of the Lord Jesus—then it's us who have got it wrong!"

Food for thought in the current climate ... Though not the only perspective.

Over to you...