Many years ago, when we attended a different church than we do now, an interesting woman began to attend our small group. It didn’t take me long to see that her perspective on the Christian life was quite different from that of the rest of us. This became especially evident on an evening we discussed the Lord’s Supper together. “I don’t need to take the Lord’s Supper at church,” she said. “I do it on my own every morning.”
I was new to the Baptist world, having grown up in the Dutch Reformed churches. In those churches, the ordinances (or sacraments, as that tradition identifies them) could only be administered by ministers of the gospel who had been approved by the denominational authorities. It would be better not to celebrate the sacraments than to risk celebrating them improperly. So her declaration that she celebrated it alone every morning cut hard against my instincts. I had to consider: Was this wrong? Was she actually participating in the Lord’s Supper, or was she just eating a piece of bread and drinking a sip of grape juice?
Not long after that, the church hosted a retreat weekend for women. I learned afterward that a couple of ladies I had been praying for had professed faith that weekend. I was thankful! But then I learned that the leaders of the women’s group had immediately gone to a nearby lake and baptized them. I was troubled! Again, I had to consider: Was this wrong? Had these women actually been baptized, or had they simply been dipped in water? Is baptism the simple act of being immersed in water after professing faith, or is it that same act within the context of a local church and under the authority of its elders? In both cases, I wondered whether these ordinances were given to individual Christians or to local churches.
I eventually came to settled convictions on these matters, and determined that the Bible nudges us much closer to the Dutch Reformed model than to the one I saw modeled by those individuals. To the credit of the pastors of that church, the same was true of them, and they endorsed neither that woman’s solo Lord’s Supper nor that retreat baptism. But these experiences taught me something: Christians sometimes like to do churchy things in an individual context. These churchy things carry a sense of sacredness or holiness that makes people feel good and makes them feel as if they are honoring God. Yet their meaning, significance, and right administration are tightly bound to the local church. Often, to do them outside of the church is to perform a mere simulacrum, to seem to do them while not doing them at all. The intention may be good, but the execution is not.
I can think of other examples. I once went to a conference where the leader encouraged attendees to lay hands on one another and pray for healing. But if the Bible calls for anyone to do this, isn’t it pastors who are praying for people within their local context, as in James 5:14? I opted out. At another conference, I was told the attendees would celebrate the Lord’s Supper together, but isn’t the Lord’s Supper for local churches, not conferences? Again, I opted out.
The wise Christian carefully distinguishes between those sacred things that are given to individuals and those that are given to the church.
Of course, not everything we do within the local church is tied exclusively to it. Singing is something churches do, but it’s not something only churches do. Reading the Bible is also something churches do, but not something only churches are permitted to do. Hence, if you want to sing by yourself or read the Bible with friends, you can do so freely. But individuals cannot oversee the ordinances, or exercise the keys of the kingdom, or preach sermons that bind the conscience. These are church things, not individual things. They have a setting, and that setting is the local church—“a group of Christians who regularly gather in Christ’s name to officially affirm and oversee one another’s membership in Jesus Christ and his kingdom through gospel preaching and gospel ordinances.”
You can’t step up to bat unless you’re a member of the team, and you can’t be a brother to a sister unless you’re a member of the family. Similarly, you can’t baptize people outside the context of a local church, and you can’t take the Lord’s Supper on your own. Why? Because you are baptized into the church so that your baptism joins you to other Christians within a congregation, and because the Lord’s Supper is by design a corporate meal through which Christians affirm their faith and profess their hope together. Ben Robin says it well: Baptism joins one to many, and the Lord’s Supper makes many into one. Neither has meaning outside the God-given context of the local church.
And so, the wise Christian carefully distinguishes between those sacred things that are given to individuals and those that are given to the church. The wise Christian takes care not to carry those churchy things outside the context of the church where they may give a sense of the sacred, while in fact being profaned.
