What Is the Point of Church?

In our day, the nominal are fleeing church as fast as they can and many of the presumedly genuine don't think "organized" churches are all that necessary. It is true that everything in the kingdom of God is supposed to revolve around love, yet organized religion doesn't come close to living out such a mantra. Furthermore, all the pedantic fuss and vitriolic disputation about esoteric doctrines doesn't make the institution any more appealing. So what's the point of church which seems so repelling anyway?

It cannot be denied that those things that are most important to God in reference to life in the Church do issue from love. Case in point:

1) Obedience toward Christ arises out of love. We cannot force ourselves to obey Christ out of sheer will or intellect. It takes love. If one loves Christ, obedience follows naturally. It is that one who loves Christ and obeys him for whom the love of God will be efficacious in turn.

2) Moving in the Spirit with great faith, and even an awesome testimony of power, only has point and purpose if it arises out of love. Seemingly spiritual giants are just bugs in the grass without love. Those things that are here only for a season, but are bound to pass away cannot possibly carry any weight at the threshold of eternity, but love will.

3) Personal friendship with God arises out of love. Since God is love, to get along with him one must adopt love too. Not like a mask, but as a transforming reality of the heart. When we start where we are and procceed in the love that God has shed abroad in our hearts, his love is brought to fullness within us. We can never get along with God and not be loving, like him.

Obviously, the point of church is love. So where is the place of doctrine and ritual in all this?

At the end of time, it won't really matter, nor will anyone care about whether or not one was Arminian or Calvinist; dispensational or covenantal; pre-, post- or a- millennial; charismatic or cessationist. What will matter is not the precision of the doctrine that was held, but the reality of the love which was practiced. Don't get me wrong, doctrine is important, it's just not more important than practicing love, not even close.

As for ritual, there's only two that Christ taught the church to follow: believer's baptism and the Lord's Supper. In neither case are these rites efficacious at appropriating grace merely because they were practiced. Both are just standardized expressions of a state of faith in the heart of the individual participating. We are baptized because we've come to believe in Christ, and we memorialize his passion through a symbolic meal because we believe the death, burial and resurrection of Christ has saved us from sin and death.

What faith has received in fullness upon its existence cannot be regulated thereafter by the practice of ritual. Sacrament, truly, has no place in the church. 

Church, ultimately, is not about rites, or religious duty, or doctrine but about relationships between brothers and sisters. Love, not doctrine or ritual, drives that. If one goes through life attending church, committed to the group but never connecting to people, one errs and misses the matter of utmost importance. If one studies the Bible and meticulously knows church doctrine, but does not know his brethren he has missed the most significant doctrinal point.

Church is the place where we learn to love one another and add others to the circle of love. The central reality of any church should be love and the way it connects believer to believer. If we strive for all else and miss that, we will have missed everything. If we lay anything on the line, if we sacrifice anything near and dear, let it be to further the love we have one for another. That, and really nothing else, is actually the point of church.