A Perfect Church, Or I Quit!

Some people in our day also withdraw from the church assembly because in their eyes it is impure, imperfect, or hypocritical. I love what J.C. Ryle said about this:

“…when St. Paul said, ‘Come out and be separate’, he did not mean that Christians ought to withdraw from every church in which there are unconverted members, or to refuse to worship in company with any who are not believers, or to keep away from the Lord’s Table if any ungodly people go up to it. This is a very common but a very grievous mistake. There is not a text in the New Testament to justify it, and it ought to be condemned as a pure invention of man. Our Lord Jesus Christ himself deliberately allowed Judas Iscariot to be an apostle for three years, and gave him the Lord’s Supper. He has taught us, in the parable of the wheat and tares, that converted and unconverted will be ‘together till the harvest’, and cannot be divided (Matt. 13.30). In his epistles to the seven churches, and in all St. Paul’s epistles, we often see faults and corruptions mentioned and reproved; but we are never told that they justify desertion of the assembly, or neglect of ordinances.

“In short, we must not look for a perfect church, a perfect congregation, and a perfect company of communicants, until the marriage supper of the Lamb. If others are unworthy churchmen, or unworthy partakers of the Lord’s Supper, the sin is theirs and not ours: we are not their judges. But to separate ourselves from church assemblies, and deprive ourselves of Christian ordinances, because others use them unworthily, is to take up a foolish, unreasonable, and unscriptural position. It is not the mind of Christ, and it certainly is not St. Paul’s idea of separation from the world” (Practical Religion, pp. 293–294).

Exactly. We should not forsake the assembly and become lone ranger, churchless Christians simply because we find faults in a church. We will always find it easy to spot impurity, imperfection, and hypocrisy in the church militant in this poor, fallen world during this present evil age. We might have to move from one church to another one for good doctrinal or practical reasons, but we shouldn’t “quit church” completely just because we cannot find a perfect one.

Compare:

• A Prelude to Apostasy: Habitual Avoidance of Public Worship.
• A Disembodied Gospel
• Churchless Christians
• The Church of God As An Essential Element of the Gospel