In December of last year (2025), I taught “church week” for the first time. This is week 10 out of 12 in YWAM’s Discipleship Bible School (DBS). In this course, students read and study through the Bible section by section, beginning with Genesis and the rest of the Torah. Church week includes Acts, Hebrews, James, 1 and 2 Peter, and Jude.
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At first sight, this is a curious grouping of books. What do they have in common? And if we would want to learn about the church from the New Testament, would these be the books we would turn to?
Acts, of course, makes sense, since it recounts the beginnings of the church. But the next book I would probably turn to is Ephesians, where the church stands at the very centre of Paul’s vision. After that, perhaps 1 Timothy and 1 Corinthians, because these letters speak of the church’s life and practice. I would not consider Hebrews.
So, why this curious combination?
One could argue that week 11, Paul’s week, covering all his letters, is even more focused on the church. Every one of Paul’s letters is addressed either to a church or to someone working with churches. The same is true of week 12, John’s week. It includes the gospel of John, his three letters, and the book of Revelation. The three letters are obviously concerned with church life, and so is the book of Revelation. The latter portrays God’s people, the saints, facing tribulation and conflict in the time between the resurrection and the final completion of God’s purpose. It, too, is a “church” book.
The Reason for the Grouping
Noticing that week 9, Jesus week, covers the synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, the structure becomes clearer. The books of week 10 are simply those that remain after the obvious groupings (gospels, Paul, John) have been set aside. It is, in a sense, a week of leftovers.
This observation leads to a deeper realization. In truth, all three concluding weeks of the DBS are church weeks. Paul’s writings and John’s writings contribute just as much – if not more – to our understanding of the church as the so-called leftover books.
Three weeks – fully one quarter of the school – focus on the church. That is a sizeable proportion. The subject must therefore matter a great deal.
This realization set me thinking.
How Important Is “Church” in the New Testament?
Last month, I reviewed Christopher Wright’s The Mission of God (paid link), a book that tells the story of the Bible as the story of God’s great redemptive purpose. I noted that Wright devotes more attention to the people of God – which includes the church – than to any other subject.
When we ask what God is doing in the world, the most visible answer is this: he is forming the church. In biblical language, he is creating “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light” (1 Pet. 2:9; cf. Tit. 2:14; the language used is drawn entirely from the OT).
We naturally assume that the New Testament is primarily about Jesus, which it is. But it is no less about the church. The church is the object of God’s love. It is also God’s agent in the world, central to his purpose of redeeming humanity and creation. God’s strategy to accomplish this is the church. It is, or should be, a central theme of Christian theology, close to God’s heart.
And to Us?
What began as a curiosity about course structure, then, led me to a larger point: in the New Testament, the church is not peripheral but central to what God is doing in the world.
However, this centrality of the church is not always reflected in how we teach or think. I asked the DBS students, each of whom had previously completed a YWAM Discipleship Training School, DTS, if they had received any teaching about the church during that course. None of them could recall any.
DTS habitually covers foundational topics such as God’s character, prayer and intercession, evangelism and mission, and spiritual warfare. But not the church.
Before the lecture week began, the DBS school leader had sent me short biographies of the students. Each included a brief statement of their passion or their aim in doing the course. Again and again, I read that they wanted to know the Bible better or to fall in love with Jesus more deeply.
But no one mentioned the church. No one expressed a desire to fall in love with the church more deeply.
What do you think God is passionate about? How important is the church to Jesus?
Read Ephesians 5:25-32 if you are in any doubt!
Church as God’s Strategy
The church, then, is not peripheral but central to everything God intends to do. Tom Wright expresses it this way:
At the heart of worship, mission, unity and holiness, then, we discover in Ephesians the vocation of the church. The church, united and holy, is designed to demonstrate to the hostile watching world that the God revealed in Jesus is the true God, the creator, redeemer, lover and glory of the whole world. Paul expounds this in terms of creation and new creation, of humanity and new humanity. (Tom Wright 2025: 17)
This is God’s answer to the problem of humanity and indeed of creation. This is what God is doing in the world: forming a community that reflects him truthfully and accurately, that truly becomes the body of Christ in the world – his hands, his mind, and his presence. Through the church God accomplishes his purpose.
Salvation through the Church?
When it comes to salvation, God stakes everything, the world, creation, the future of the universe, on this community. On us. Is God insane? Is that crazy?
Surely not. We may assume that God knows what he is doing. Yet his choice does, perhaps, explain why things move forward rather slowly. God entrusts an extraordinary responsibility to his people, and – understatement of the century – we don’t always live up to it.
Church is messy, sometimes painfully so, and there is no quick fix. Yet, God has determined that this imperfect community will play a decisive role in the fulfilment of his purposes.
It follows from this that the character of the church is key. If people, if we, are God’s strategy, we must become better, deeper people.
A crucial question therefore emerges: What sort of people, and what kind of communities, are we becoming?
Identity (Quality) Markers
Under the new covenant, the defining markers of God’s people are no longer circumcision, sabbath observance, and dietary laws. Instead, they are:
- Unity
- Love
- Holiness
We know all too well what happens when the church fails to live in unity, love, or holiness.
But what if we did?
If unity, love, and holiness truly marked our communities, the church would become what it was always meant to be: a living sign of God’s new creation. The future intended by God would become visible in the present. And perhaps then the world would glimpse, through imperfect people like us, the incredible goodness of God.
Attribution
All images taken from Unsplash and Pixabay (CC0), except for:
References
Unless indicated differently, Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®, copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Wright, Christopher J. H. 2025. The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative, Second edition (IVP Academic; paid link)
Wright, Tom. 2025. The Vision of Ephesians: The Task of the Church and the Glory of God (SPCK Publishing; paid link)
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