I have long said that a weakness of evangelical Christianity is that it does not really have any way to account for what the church is and is not. Generally you will hear something like, "It is the invisible and non-institutional body of all true believers in Christ." That's nice I guess, but there's a real problem. That sort of thinking is found NO WHERE in the Bible. Yep. I said that. NO WHERE. Here's a pastor I respect a great deal taking a stab at explaining Paul's theology of the church:
Just as we can trust God because God has no agenda that is not for our good, so we can trust the church because it is the sort of community it is, a community of active peacemaking and peacekeeping in which no one exists in isolation or grows up in isolation or suffers in isolation. The slogan of the church's life is "not without the other"; no I without a you, no I without a we. Yet that doesn't mean that the identity of the church is a herd identity, with everyone's individuality submerged in the collective. The difference between the I and the you remains real difference—otherwise there would be no challenge about it. You may have noticed that few churches are characterized by drab sameness; when people try to create a herd mentality in the church, whether in a local congregation or in a wider institution, sooner or later it tends to break down dramatically.
So believing in the church is really believing in the unique gift of the other that God has given you to live with. The New Testament sees the church as a community in which each person has a gift that only he or she can give into the common life. We Christians are so used to the imagery the Bible uses, especially the great metaphor of Christ's body, that we forget just how radical and comprehensive is the vision of a community of universal giftedness. The ancient world had sometimes used the image of the body to describe a society in which there were different functions, a very natural use for such language. But it was left to Christians to reconceive this in terms of different gifts, and to draw out the further revolutionary implication that the frustration of any one member is the frustration of all because then there is something that is not being properly given. Someone has not been granted the freedom to offer what only that individual can give to the whole.
--Rowan Williams
I also like that there is an account here for the community and the individual in God's plan and in relation to salvation and the Kingdom work. I think that this factor of individual-community is one of the key failings of Islam. I also think that this kind of individualistic church-theology (or ecclesiology) that evangelicals preach is a reason that we have not seen more converts from Islam. We need to recover an older, more community-based understanding of the church. It is not just a detail. It is not just a secondary benefit to salvation. It is part and parcel of God saving us and glorifying himself in the world.
Here is the rest of the sermon.
