The Two Churches

There are, and probably always have been, two churches. There is the visible church, both the buildings and other structures you can point to and the people who attend them, Catholic, Protestant, even Mormon; it doesn't matter you can spread as far out from whatever you take to be the structural center of the faith as far as you want, from whatever orthodoxy too whatever heresy you determine in whatever group that claims to be a church of Christ. Then there is the invisible church. It is made up entirely of people, people who, whatever their doctrine, do their conscientious, prayerful best to live the gospel. This is the true church. No one can point to its members, no one but God.

When we hear the church or the faith spoken of in the media or almost anywhere we know they are referring to the visible church. They do this mostly for convenience and ease. When they talk about it, they have a pretty well determined and shareable idea of what they are talking about. (Like most concepts, it will crumble if you press it, but there's no need to press it.) There's nothing wrong with this, but it does have consequences.

The first consequence is that it makes Christianity itself responsible for all the sins of the visible church, from the election of Donald Trump, to the idly bystanding during the Shoah to clergy sexual abuse. These things have to be condemned. But they are all about the failure of Christians (or pretend Christians); they do not touch on Christianity itself. (If that is a little overstated, we'll have to return to it later to clarify; it's essentially true.)

Don't misunderstand. These failures and countless others are certainly sometimes the failures of actual Christians, members of the invisible church. The members of that church are not perfect people. They are not necessarily even better people than the most moral of atheists. They get scared. They fail to act through their faith and rely on themselves. They get confused about right and wrong; they fail to negotiate the myriad ambiguities, the shifting territory of right and wrong. The invisible church is perhaps no less prone to failure than the visible church.

But when the invisible church fails, that is not an indictment of the faith. Jesus admonished us all to be perfect, but he never guaranteed that anyone would achieve that nonetheless necessary standard. The difference is that the members of the invisible church try not to fail, do their absolute to learn from their failures, call on God for help, care about perfecting themselves for the love of God and guide their growth by the principles of the Christian faith.

The visible church is not made of individuals qua individuals. It is a collective. It has no conscience. Like any individual congregation, it is composed of members of the invisible church and members who invoke the name of the faith without any understanding of or commitment to that faith. The problem here is this: the visible church is the image that nearly all the faith's detractors know and use to condemn the faith. It is all that can be seen from the outside. It's easy to attack. And most armies these days look for easy targets.