One Body, Many Parts: What Is a Church?
PHILIP YANCEY
5 min read ⭑
Paul’s first visit to the Grecian city of Corinth occurs during one of the most stressful times of his career. Lynch mobs had chased him out of Thessalonica and Berea. The next stop, Athens, brought on a confrontation with intellectual scoffers, and by the time Paul arrives at Corinth, he is in a fragile emotional state.
Shortly, opposition springs up in Corinth, and Jewish leaders haul Paul into court. But in the midst of this crisis, God visits Paul with a strong message of comfort: “I am with you, and no one is going to attack and harm you, because I have many people in this city” (Acts 18:10).
These last words must have been startling to Paul, for in his day Corinth was known mainly for its lewdness and drunken brawling. The Corinthians worshiped the goddess of love, after all, and a temple built in her honor employed more than a thousand prostitutes. Thus, Corinth seems the last place on earth to expect a church to take root. Yet that’s exactly what happens. A Jewish couple has opened their home to Paul, and for the next eighteen months, he stays in Corinth to nurture an eager band of converts.
Corinth serves as a melting pot for Syrians, Persians, Jews, Greeks, Egyptians, slaves, sailors, athletes, gamblers and charioteers. And the Corinthian church reflects that same crazy-quilt pattern of diversity. When Paul writes them this letter, he searches for a way to drive home the importance of Christian unity. At last, he settles on a striking analogy from the human body. By comparing members of the church of Christ to individual parts of a human body, he can neatly illustrate how diverse members can indeed work together in unity.
This analogy fits so well that it becomes Paul’s favorite way of portraying the church. He will refer to “the body of Christ” more than thirty times in his various letters. Having also raised the question of how diverse people can work harmoniously in a spiritual body, he answers with a lyrical description of love, the greatest of all spiritual gifts.
Jerry Wang; Unsplash
The first few chapters of 1 Corinthians show the apostle Paul struggling with a basic question: Just what is this thing called a “church”? Paul had never asked such questions about Judaism; culture, religious tradition, race and even the worshipers’ clothing established the identity of that religion. But what is a Christian church? What does God have in mind? The answer must have seemed elusive indeed in the unruly context of Corinth. Almost twenty centuries later, the answer still seems elusive.
Paul’s first letter to Corinth betrays his hesitation, mainly in the way he gropes for words. You are God’s field, he says in chapter 3, and proceeds to explore that metaphor for a while. On the other hand, you are more like God’s building. Yes, exactly. I lay the foundation, and someone else adds the next layer. Better yet, you’re a temple, a building designed to house God. Yes, indeed! Think about that: God living in you, his sacred building.
He continues in such a vein throughout the book until finally, in chapter 12, he seizes upon a metaphor that fits best: the church as God’s body. The book changes tone at that point, its style elevating from that of personal correspondence to the magnificent prose of chapter 13.
What would Paul, the master of metaphor, say if he were to write 1 Corinthians today — if he were writing, say, to the First Presbyterian Church of Spokane, Washington, or to St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Atlanta, Georgia, or Flatirons Church in Lafayette, Colorado? What word pictures would best communicate to us moderns what God has in mind for the church?
I (Philip) feel secure using the image of family for the church, for it is one used within the Bible. I believe, though, that the vision of the church as a family has even more meaning today than in biblical times because of changes in society.
In an institution, status derives from performance. The business world has learned that human beings respond well to rewards of status; they can be powerful motivators. In families, however, status works differently. How does one earn status in a family? A child “earns” the family’s rights solely by virtue of birth. An underachieving child is not kicked out of the family. Indeed, a sickly child, who “produces” very little, may actually receive more attention than her healthy siblings. As novelist John Updike once wrote, “Families teach us how love exists in a realm above liking or disliking, coexisting with indifference, rivalry and even antipathy.”
“Henri Nouwen once defined a community as ‘a place where the person you least want to live with always lives.’”
Similarly, in God’s family, we are told, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female” (Galatians 3:28). All such artificial distinctions have melted under the sun of God’s grace. As God’s adopted children we gain the same rights, clearly undeserved, as those enjoyed by the firstborn, Jesus Christ himself — a book like Ephesians underscores that astonishing truth again and again.
For this reason, it grieves me to see local churches that run more like a business institution than a family. In his discussion of spiritual gifts, the apostle Paul warns sternly against valuing one member more highly than another (1 Corinthians 12:21–26).
In this passage, Paul is drawing on his favorite metaphor for the church: the human body. And yet the best way I can visualize how these truths might play themselves out in an actual group of people is to go back to a scene of a human family gathered around a table for a holiday meal.
Every family contains some successful individuals and some miserable failures. At Thanksgiving, corporate vice-president Aunt Mary sits next to Uncle Charles, who drinks too much and has never held a job. Although some of the folks gathered around the table are clever and some dense, some are ugly and some attractive, some healthy and some with disabilities, in a family, these differences become insignificant.
I sometimes think that God invented the human institution of the family as a training ground to prepare us for how we should relate within other institutions. Families work best not by papering over their differences but rather by celebrating them. A healthy family builds up the weakest members while not tearing down the strong. As John Wesley’s mother put it, “Which child of mine do I love best? I love the sick one until he’s well, the one away from home until she’s back.”
Family is the one human institution we have no choice over. We get in simply by being born, and as a result, we are involuntarily thrown together with a menagerie of strange and unlike people. Church calls for another step: to voluntarily choose to band together with a strange menagerie because of a common bond in Jesus Christ. I have found that such a community has much in common with a family. Henri Nouwen once defined a community as “a place where the person you least want to live with always lives.” His definition applies equally to the group that gathers each Thanksgiving and the group that congregates each Sunday morning.
Daily Contemplation
Have you ever attended a church? What challenges have you encountered there? What benefits have you realized? Thank God for the ways in which the church has helped you meet him and sense his love. Ask God to help you accept the less-than-perfect aspects as just a part of the larger blessing he intends the church to be.
Philip Yancey previously served as editor-at-large for Christianity Today magazine. He has written thirteen Gold Medallion Award–winning books and won two ECPA Book of the Year awards for What’s So Amazing About Grace? and The Jesus I Never Knew. Four of his books have sold over one million copies. He lives with his wife in Colorado.
Taken from The Bible Revealed by Philip Yancey and Brenda Quinn. Copyright © 2025. Used by permission of Zondervan.
