Have you ever heard of term the invisible church? The idea of the invisible church was first developed in depth by Saint Augustine. He made a distinction between the invisible church and the visible church. This distinction by Augustine has often been misunderstood. What he meant by the visible church was the church as an institution that we see visibly in the world. It has a list of members on its rolls and we can identify them.

Before we consider the invisible church, let’s ask a question: do you have to go to church to be a Christian? Is church attendance, if you’re physically able, a requirement to go to heaven? In a very technical sense, the answer is no. However, we need to remember a few things. Christ commands His people not to forsake the assembling together (Heb. 10:25). When God constituted the people of Israel, He organized them into a visible nation and placed upon them a sober and sacred obligation to be in corporate worship before Him. If a person is in Christ, he is called to participate in koinonia—the fellowship of other Christians and the worship of God according to the precepts of Christ. If a person knows all these things and persistently and willfully refuses to join in them, would that not raise serious questions about the reality of that person’s conversion? Perhaps a person could be a new Christian and take that position, but I would say that’s highly unlikely.

Some of us may be deceiving ourselves in terms of our own conversion. We may claim to be Christians, but if we love Christ, how can we despise His bride? How can we consistently and persistently absent ourself from that which He has called us to join—His visible church? I offer a sober warning to those who are doing this. You may, in fact, be deluding yourself about the state of your soul.

The invisible church is sometimes mistakenly thought of as something antithetical to the visible church, something that’s outside of, or apart from, the visible church. Augustine didn’t think in these categories. Augustine said that the invisible church is found substantially within the visible church. Imagine two circles. The first circle has “the visible church” written on it. That’s the outward, humanly perceivable, institutional church as we know it. The invisible church, as another circle, exists substantially within the circle of the visible church. There may be a few people in the invisible church who aren’t members of the visible church, but they are few and far between.

Why does Augustine speak of an invisible church? He does this to be faithful to the teaching of Jesus in the New Testament. Augustine taught that the church is a corpus permixtum. What does that mean? We know what a corpus is. It’s a body. Corpus Christi means what? The body of Christ. Corporation is an organization of people. Corpus permixtum means, the church is a mixed body.

Within the physical confines of the institutional church there are people who are true believers, but there are also unbelievers inside the visible, institutional church. They’re in the church, but they’re not in Christ because they’ve made a false profession of faith. Jesus said of some of His contemporaries, “This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me” (Matt. 15:8). Jesus recognized that there were people within Israel who were not true believers. Paul said something similar: “Not all who are descended from Israel belong to Israel” (Rom. 9:6). These Jews went through the rituals and were part of the visible community. They were participating in all of the activities, but they were still aliens and strangers to the things of God.

In the New Testament, the metaphor that Jesus uses with respect to this is the metaphor of the tares and the wheat. Tares are weeds. The metaphor is a simple one in the agricultural environment. In order to get maximum productivity out of a garden, one has to minimize the tares because they seem to grow more easily than the produce.

Jesus uses this metaphor to give a warning to the church that, on the one hand, the church is to be engaged in discipline so that those weeds that threaten to destroy the purity of the church are removed. He also told us to take great care in exercising church discipline, lest in our zeal to purify the church we rip out the wheat along with the tares.

God looks on the heart and what always remains invisible to me is the soul of another person. I can listen to your confession of faith. I can observe your life. But I don’t know what’s in the deepest chambers of your heart. I can’t see your soul. I can’t read your mind. But God can read your mind, and God knows exactly what the state of your soul is at any given moment. What is invisible to me is visible to God. This is a distinction with respect to our limited perception.

Who is in the invisible church? According to Augustine, all those who are true believers. And he referred, of course, to the elect, because all of the elect, according to Augustine, finally come to true faith. And all of those who come to true faith are numbered among the elect. So when he spoke about the invisible church, he was speaking about the elect, those who truly are in Christ and are true children of God.

John Calvin said that we ought not to think of the invisible church as something that is imaginary or lives in a twilight zone. Following Augustine, Calvin insisted that the invisible church exists substantially within the visible church. He said it is the principal task of the invisible church to make the invisible church visible.

What did he mean by that? Calvin was going back to the ascension of Jesus and the last question the disciples asked of Jesus before he departed this world when they asked, “Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” Jesus said: “It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth” (Acts 1:7–8).

This statement made by Jesus is often misunderstood because of our Christian jargon. If a Christian is asked, “What does it mean to witness?” the normal answer given is “to tell somebody about Christ.” That’s not entirely false. There is a sense in which evangelism is a form of witnessing. But it’s not the only form. The purpose of witnessing is to make something manifest that is hidden. Calvin said that it is the task of the church to make the invisible kingdom visible. We do that, first of all, by the proclamation of the gospel—by evangelism. But we also do it by modeling the kingdom of God, by demonstrating justice in the world, by demonstrating mercy in the world, and by showing the world what the kingdom of God is supposed to look like. That means the church is to embody and to incarnate the life of God’s Spirit in all that it does so that its good works are not hidden under a bushel, but they are plainly in view. We should bear witness to the presence of Christ and to His kingdom in the world.

There is a danger when we use the terms visible and invisible. Some people think that if they’re in the invisible church it means they can be secret service Christians. But we know that the New Testament mandate is for us to bear witness to Christ, to show forth the light of the gospel, and to make His kingdom visible. And that’s what the church is to do.

The church in any environment, in any location, in any generation is always more or less visible and more or less authentic. But even churches can lose their lampstand, and can stop being churches. Churches can become apostate. Denominations can become apostate. Whole communions can depart the invisible church and no longer be true churches.

Are you a member of the invisible church? The invisible church is a church that always enjoys unity because we are truly one with Christ. The point of unification of the invisible church, the thing that unifies and transcends church boundaries and denominational lines, is our being in-grafted into Christ. All who are in Christ and all in whom Christ is, are members of His invisible church. That unity is already there and nothing can destroy it. That doesn’t mean that we can rest at that point. It’s not that we can simply be satisfied with the unity of the invisible church. We should still be working as much as we possibly can for a genuine unity of the visible church.

-R.C. Sproul, What Is the Church?, First edition, The Crucial Questions Series (Orlando, FL: Reformation Trust, 2013), 23–30.

Article by W. Robert Godfrey – Original source: https://www.ligonier.org/learn/articles/the-marks-of-the-church

If you move to a new town, you have to find a new church. The search for a new church can be difficult and frustrating. If you pick up the Yellow Pages and look under “church,” you are likely to confront a bewildering array of possibilities. Perhaps you already have some fairly definite ideas of what you want in a church. You may be looking for a good youth group or active senior citizens group. You may want a powerful preacher or a certain kind of music. You may be very loyal to one denomination or you may like to “shop around.”

What should you be looking for in choosing a new church? Your first concern should be that the church be a “true church.” You do not want to choose a church that is part of a sect or a cult. You do not want a church that still bears the name of church, but whose lampstand Christ has removed (Rev. 1–3). How do you recognize a true church? This question was acute at the time of the Reformation. The Roman Catholic Church in the sixteenth century basically argued that Christ preserved the true church through the work of the pope, the bishop of Rome. The true church is easy to recognize because it is in fellowship with the pope. Any church that does not submit to the pope is a false church.

The Reformers did not accept Rome’s approach. They argued that the true church is not marked by submission to a supposedly infallible apostolic office—the Papacy—but by acceptance of apostolic truth. Luther declared that “the sole, uninterrupted, infallible mark of the church has always been the Word.” The true church is marked by submission to the Scriptures.

Anyone familiar with the Reformation knows the importance of the Bible in the formation of Protestantism. Against the claims of the medieval church that tradition, bishops, and councils were authoritative along with the Bible, the Reformers insisted that the Bible is the only absolute authority for Christians. The Bible must judge all traditions and church officers and assemblies. It is not surprising then that the Reformers taught that the centrality of the Word is the key mark of the true church. As one of the Reformation confessions put it, the true church is known “in short, if all things are managed according to the pure Word of God, all things contrary thereto rejected, and Jesus Christ acknowledged as the only Head of the Church” (Belgic Confession, Article 29).

This general recognition of the Word as the mark of the true church came to specific expression. Among the Reformed churches, eventually three marks were identified: faithful preaching of the Word, faithful administration of the sacraments, and faithful exercise of discipline.

In focusing on the marks of the church, the Reformers were not saying that all a good church needs to have are the marks of the church. They focused on the marks because the marks make the true church recognizable. The church of Christ has many more characteristics than the three marks. But these characteristics—we might mention prayer, fellowship, devotion—are not so easy to observe. The marks are important because they display the faithfulness of the church.

Preaching

Faithful preaching was the first mark of the true church because preaching most directly brings God’s Word to His people. The Reformers stressed that God’s great means of speaking to His people was by preaching. Luther talked of the several forms that the Word takes. The first is the eternal Word, the second person of the Trinity. The second is the incarnate Word, Jesus. The third is the inscripturated Word, the Bible. The fourth is the “shouted Word,” the preaching. At the heart of Christian worship and life is the ministry of the Word in preaching. If preaching is not faithful, the life of the church cannot be faithful. It is an essential mark of the true church.

Calvin added that this first mark of the true church is not just faithful preaching of the Word. A man standing on a street corner may be faithfully declaring the Word, but there is no church. Calvin said that in a true church a further dimension of this mark is that the Word must also be faithfully heard and received. Reformed worship is sometimes called a dialogue between God and His people—God speaks and His people respond. Calvin’s point is that if God speaks through the preaching of His Word and no one is listening and responding, then no church exists. But where the Word is faithfully preached and received, there the mark of the true church can be seen.

Sacraments

The second mark of the true church is the faithful administration of the sacraments. At first glance we might be tempted to think that this mark is really more a sixteenth-century concern than a contemporary one. The Reformation, after all, confronted the Roman church, which stressed the absolute centrality of its seven sacraments. Did the Reformers make the sacraments a mark of the church just to distinguish their teaching of two sacraments (baptism and the Lord’s Supper) from the sacraments of Rome?

The Reformers certainly had a more fundamental concern than just to separate themselves from Rome on the sacraments. They were convinced that the sacraments are a fifth form of the Word, the visible Word. That phrase—“the visible Word”—had originated with Augustine and Calvin in particular had repeated it. The sacraments visibly display the very heart of the Gospel. Baptism shows that we are saved only by the washing away of sin in Jesus, and the Lord’s Supper shows that Christians live only through the body and blood of Christ offered as a sacrifice on the cross. These sacraments are an observable mark of the true church. In a true church the biblical sacraments are faithfully administered and received.

Discipline

The third mark of the true church is discipline. The exercise of the discipline taught in Scripture demonstrates the church’s determination to pursue holy living before the Lord. If flagrant heresy or notorious unchristian behavior is tolerated in the church, how can that church be genuinely receiving the Word of God? Paul clearly insists that the church exercise such discipline (1 Cor. 5:1–5, 13). Discipline is necessary in the church according to the Belgic Confession (Article 32) to preserve harmony, unity, and obedience. Where such discipline is missing, the church is not recognizable as a holy community.

The early Reformers such as John Calvin did not identify discipline as a mark of the church. Calvin certainly recognized the vital importance of discipline and even called it “the sinew of the church.” Perhaps he felt that discipline was too subjective to function well as a mark. How faithful must a church be in discipline to qualify as a true church? But later Reformers saw the mark of discipline as one way of testing Calvin’s concern that the Word not only be preached but be truly received. If a Christian community does not exercise and submit to discipline to some extent, then no true church exists.

Each of the three marks is an expression of the one great mark, the Word. Each mark expresses an aspect of the Word’s life and power in the church. The true church submits to the Word of God. As the church father Tertullian said, “They are true churches which hold to what they received from the apostles.”

By God’s appointment the church is a vital and necessary institution. Each Christian needs the fellowship and ministry of the church. But that spiritual need can only be met by a true church. Today the variety of churches in the Yellow Pages makes the marks of the church more important and useful than ever. The Reformation insight into the Word as the great mark of the church must still guide and direct us to true churches of Christ.