What Church Should We Join?

An Excerpt from The Book
“WHY? New Testament Principles Today”
By G. Fred Hamilton

Christendom presents a confusing mass of different groups of people professing to be Christians and claiming to be "The Church" or "A Church," each having varying forms of church government. Some of these originated under the leadership of an outstanding personality or in an attempts to return to the practice of forgotten or neglected truth. Most of these churches have names which distinguish them from other groups and some are large national or multinational systems having a pyramidical structure, with "ordained clergy" answerable to a central ruling authority. A Christian who is seeking to find guidance from the teaching and examples of the New Testament alone will look in vain for scriptural support for this conglomerate of ecclesiastical profession.

That such confusion developed during the early centuries is evident, as we have seen, form the grave warnings of apostolic writings and in particular from the Lord's letters to the churches in Asia , but what was the pattern of the apostolic or New Testament time? When souls were saved and indwelt by the Holy Spirit - the living bond between every believer and the Head and members of the Church which is His Body (I Corinthians 12) - did they have to join a church? Their conversion in the first place brought them into the Church which He was building and it was God who added them to it (Acts 2:47). This Church is a spiritual building (Ephesians 2:22) composed of "living stones" (I Peter 2:50). In apostolic days, as recorded in the Book of Acts, there were no competitors claiming to be "The Church" to the exclusion of others and all the believers in one place were together (Acts 5:14,14). Before the passing of many years, however, the work of the enemy began to appear, as the Lord had foretold to His disciples in the parable of the "Tares" (Matthew 13) and there were false professors among the true as well as unprincipled men who arose even among the shepherds of the flock and who sought to draw away disciples after them (Acts 20:29,30). This produced a multiplicity of divisions such as those which were already appearing in Corinth when the apostle wrote his first epistle (I Corinthians 3).

Nevertheless the pattern of things at the beginning was preserved in the New Testament writings and it is clear that scriptural local gatherings of real Christians were very numerous, all expressing what was true of the whole church. In this sense they were "Christ's Body" in the locality where they met together and as such they would recognize and receive all whom Christ Himself had received (I Corinthians 12:27; Romans 15:7). Christians in these churches thus accepted all who were newly converted or who came to them from other areas. In the latter case it was customary to make use of letters of commendation (2 Corinthians 3:1) or for a Christian from elsewhere to be introduced by another known to the local gatherings (as with Barnabas and Saul in Acts 9:26). The Book of Acts and the epistles make evident that each of these local churches was autonomous and directly responsible to the Lord - as is also clear from the separate "Lampstands" each representing a local church, in Revelation 2 and 3.