Eberhard Busch, from his recently translated work, Drawn to Freedom: Christian Faith Today in Conversation with the Heidelberg Catechism, on the fellowship of believers in the church:

One can foster religious convictions on one's own, but we have Christian faith only in the fellowship of the church. Private Christianity is wooden iron. A church that is like a restaurant, where all kinds of customers sit at individual tables and are served by waiters who rush here and there attempting to meet their wishes, is wooden iron too. If any comfort consists in the fact that I do not 'belong to myself,' then there is no comfort for me without having my circling around myself taken away from me. Where the church is, there a redemption comes into view that redeems me not simply as an individual, but redeems me also from my individualism. So to be a Christian means to be in the church.

Article 55 expounds this. It says rightly first off that all Christians together and each individually – as members of Christ – 'share in one fellowship with Christ' and in his gifts. For the Head of the community is not only the key to what the community is. He is also the reason that Christian life is life in fellowship. Jesus Christ is Immanuel, God's guarantee to be God in fellowship with us humans. As such, Jesus Christ is also the fulfillment of the double command of love, in which the vertical and the horizontal, the God-human relationships and the human-human relationship are insolubly linked. If the Holy Spirit brings us into relationship with this God who in Christ keeps fellowship with us, then faith means: 'fellowship with Christ.' If we come into fellowship with him, we come into fellowship with all with whom he keeps fellowship. None of us can be a child of God in the Holy Spirit without being together with other children of God who now may and should discover one another as sisters and brothers. That 'the Son of God...gathers, protects, and preserves' the church does not take away the responsibility of those who experiences this, or make them passive. This action calls them forth and calls them out to answer in word and deed and to confess themselves part of the church gathered and supported by him. They do this because they no longer belong to themselves, but to their faithful Savior (225-226).

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Hermann Sasse, a twentieth-century Lutheran theologian, had this to say regarding humanity's efforts to create an ideal church:

Ubi Christus, ibi ecclesia, 'Where Christ is, there is the church'. With this saying one of the oldest church fathers spoke of the mystery of the church. The saying also sums up Luther’s faith in the church. It is not the power of our faith, nor the holiness of our life that constitutes the church, but rather that 'Where Christ is, there is the church'. When the church is called a holy people, a communion of saints, it is not to be understood in the way it has often been understood in the history of the church: 'the church should be a holy people, therefore only the holy shall belong to her. Away with all the unholy! The honour of Christ demands it!' When the worst of sinners must be excluded from the fellowship, one must then begin to classify sins in order to determine which ones lead to exclusion. How often has not that been attempted, both in the past and more recently. How imposing was the strictness of the ancient church, when people sought to create a holy and pure church (as also happens now). Or consider the Donatists, who demanded that at least the clergy should be free of mortal sin. Whenever the attempt has been made to create an ideal church, the end result has always been bitter disappointment. The community of saints turns into a community of Pharisees.

As the Dutch theologian, Herman Bavinck, notes in the fourth volume of his Reformed Dogmatics, 'according to Scripture the characteristic essence of the church lies in the fact that it is the people of God' (298), of which Christ is the head. The church exists because Christ 'gathers, protects, and preserves for himself a community chosen for eternal life and united in true faith' (Heidelberg Catechism, Q&A 54).

The church is not primarily an institution, nor is it a group of people who live perfectly holy lives or believe all the right things. To be sure, the church does have an institutional character, and its members do strive to be increasingly holy and to be faithful to Scripture in their doctrine. But none of these precede the fact that the church people of God, over which Christ is Lord.

(HT: Anthony Bradley, via Paul McCain)

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John P. Burgess, in his book, After Baptism: Shaping the Christian Life, writes the following:

Hunger and thirst...teach us that humans ultimately live in a state of dependence. If we understand them rightly, we have to confess that we receive life as God's gift. Even the energies that we expend in taking care of ourselves and our basic needs are finally sustained by powers and forces beyond ourselves. Every day of our lives, we are dependent on food and drink to keep us alive. We never eat and drink once and for all; we have to eat and drink again and again, and so we continually pray, 'Give us this day, our daily bread.'
 
So too we are dependent on God's grace for our basic identity. We can never simply choose to be whoever we want. Nor will we ever know ourselves well enough to say, 'I finally have it all together. I have no need of God or others.' Dependence on daily bread symbolizes our dependence on God for our life's meaning and purpose. Our baptismal identity, like our physical energies, must be renewed every day. We need daily sustenance in the life to which Christ has called us. For that reason, 'one does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God' (Matt. 4:4).
 
This daily sustenance comes to Christians in Word, sacrament, and patterns and rhythyms of life together. God feeds us again and again. God continually renews our capacity to receive Christ's self-giving love and, then, to offer our very selves to God and others. 'Give us this day, our daily bread' is never just a call for physical nourishment, but is also a plea for the bread of heaven that is life in the risen Lord.
 
In the end, Jesus himself must feed us and quench our thirst. He declares, 'I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty' (John 6:35), for 'the water that I will give them will become in them like a spring of living water gushing up to eternal life' (John 4:14). Christians have found this spiritual food and drink whenever they have celebrated the Eucharist. Baptism first marks us in our new identity in Christ, while the Eucharist gives us strength to persist in our baptismal identity, even in the midst of trial and temptation. Baptism sends us into the world, and the Eucharist offers us food and drink for the journey. Baptism tells us who we really are, and the Eucharist deepens and confirms our identity. Font leads to table. The helpless baby we place in God's hands will surely receive the basic nutrition that she needs to live out her baptism (122).

The Eucharist is not just a memorial. Through it Christ sustains us and gives us life. Let us stop starving ourselves of the nourishment he gives.

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If you are not familiar with Lesslie Newbigin's story, he grew up in Britain and studied at Cambridge, where he was converted and trained for the ministry. After getting married, he spent nearly forty years in India as a missionary. When he was in Britain as a child and a student, it was still something of a "Christian" society, but upon his return in 1974, he discovered a country that he could describe as nothing less than pagan.

Michael Goheen, in his doctoral dissertation on Newbigin's missionary ecclesiology (which is available online for free!), writes that Newbigin had come to understand the church's relationship to the culture as a missionary encounter because "the church embodies the gospel as an alternative way of life to the culture in which it is set and thereby challenges the culture's fundamental assumptions" (365). Newbigin borrowed language from the sociology of knowledge to express this notion of a missionary encounter in his book, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society. He writes,

The gospel gives rise to a new plausibility structure, a radically different vision of things from those that shape all human cultures apart from the gospel. The Church, therefore, as the bearer of the gospel, inhabits a plausibility structure which is at variance with, and which calls into question, those that govern all human cultures without exception (9).

Goheen adds that "all cultures exhibit a plausibility structure that embody and transmit the fundamental beliefs of its inhabitants. Those fundamental beliefs stand in opposition to the gospel and if there is to be a missionary encounter, the church itself must be a community that embodies an alternative set of foundational beliefs" (365-366). If the church is faithful in doing this then three things will result: first, the foundational beliefs of a culture will be challenged; second, the church will offer the gospel as a credible alternative way of life; and third, the church will call the culture to radical conversion and invite it to live and understand the world through the lens of the gospel. At that point, the culture is left with the choice of accepting or rejecting the gospel and the lordship of Jesus Christ. As Newbigin expresses it in his little book, The Other Side of 1984: Questions for the Churches, the church that embodies the gospel

must necessarily clash with contemporary culture. It must challenge the whole 'fiduciary framework' within which our culture operates. It must call unequivocally for radical conversion, a conversion of the mind so that things are seen differently, and a conversion of the will so that things are done differently. It must decline altogether the futile attempt to commend the biblical vision of how things are by seeking to adjust it to the assumptions of our culture (53).

The fact that Newbigin would say something this provocative in the context he did was significant, for he was speaking about a culture that, to some degree, still believed it was a Christian culture, much like America today. But Newbigin understands that just because a certain percentage of a culture's population professes belief in God or attends church regularly does not mean its underlying worldview is shaped by the gospel.

Further, he rightly recognizes that the worldviews that give shape to a culture are religious in nature. Religion, in Newbigin's view, is not just a cultural form, and "it is more than an institution that embodies beliefs and practices concerning God and the destiny of the soul. It is a set of ultimate commitments about the nature of the world that gives shape, direction, and meaning to life and demands final loyalty" (Goheen, 367).

And here, then, is the reason the gospel needs to challenge the foundational beliefs of a culture—because all of life is religion, and everything we think, say, and do is either in service to God or an idol. Christ is Lord over all of life, and the church is called to proclaim and embody this truth. As witnesses to Jesus and the presence of his kingdom and rule, we cannot be satisfied to accept a sacred/secular divide and leave our culture to let its presuppositions inform certain areas while challenging its assumptions in other areas. All of life belongs to the Lord and our calling as the church is to unapologetically call to the world to recognize that truth.

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Lesslie Newbigin, the renowned missionary theologian, writes the following in his 1989 book, The Gospel in a Pluralist Society:

The logic of mission is this: the true meaning of the human story has been disclosed. Because it is the truth, it must be shared universally. It cannot be private opinion. When we share it with all peoples, we give them the opportunity to know the truth about themselves, to know who they are because they can know the true story of which their lives are a part. Wherever the gospel is preached the question of the meaning of the human story—the universal and the personal story of each human being—is posed. Thereafter the situation can never be the same. It can never revert to the old harmonies, the old securities, the old static or cyclical patterns of the past. Now decisions have to be made for or against Christ, for Christ as the clue to history or for some other clue. There will always be the temptation, even for those within the Christian community, to find the clue in the success of some project of our own, to see our program (whether of church growth or of human development) as the success story which is going to give meaning to our lives. The gospel calls us back again and again to the real clue, the crucified and risen Jesus, so that we learn that the meaning of history is not immanent in history itself, that history cannot find its meaning at the end of a process of development, but that history is given its meaning by what God has done in Jesus Christ and by what he has promised to do; and that the true horizon is not at the successful end of our projects but in his coming to reign…

We believe that the truth about the human story has been disclosed in the events which form the substance of the gospel. We believe, therefore, that these events are the real clue to the story of every person, for every human life is part of the whole human story and cannot be understood apart from that story. It follows then that the test of our real belief is our readiness to share it with all peoples (125-126).

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