“Where is the true church?”
When Jesus told his disciples, “I will build my
church”, we now know that he did not have in mind Judean sects, institutions,
denominations or even faithful local gatherings of God’s people. Still less was
he talking about a literal building of any sort. All of these may possess or
reflect the truth to some degree, and any of these may have at various times
faithfully represented God to the world, but none of these nouns truly captures
the scope of what the Lord Jesus meant to do. He intended to take Peter’s
accurate testimonial statement, “You
are the Christ, the Son of the living God”, and to build
around it a community of individuals set apart from the world to himself, a heavenly
nation that would span from the first century to our present day and beyond,
and from Judea to the farthest corners of the world.