When The Church Gets Big

On the growing role of ecclesiology in my faith

Over the past few years, my ecclesiology has ballooned to take up significant space in my theology as a whole. A large part of why that has happened is realizing for most of my life, I had the spiritual life flipped upside down.

Regardless of what form it took, faith was primarily about my relationship with God. Whether that was me going to heaven when I die, my personal relationship with Jesus, my need to obey God’s commands, my quest for truth, beauty, and goodness, my ability to persevere through suffering, and all the other subtle or not so subtle ways that faith was centered around me. There is an aspect of this that is true. God has individual relationships with each of us, and he is transforming us as individuals into the likeness of Christ. God saves and loves each one of us personally. So, there isn’t anything wrong with thinking about faith in individualistic terms. It’s when that is the only category—and I’d maybe go so far as to say the primary category—when we reach the ceiling of faith far faster than we imagined we would.