Please remember that half the New Testament is written to churches not individuals! (Laying aside the four biographies of the Lord, nearly all the New Testament is addressed to churches. Churches: vibrant, free, loose. Churches that met in homes, whose people shared each other's lives and loved one another--and their Lord--indescribably.) Those churches were incredible--not so much in being free of problems or in being morally perfect, but in their corporate, daily pursuit and experience of Jesus Christ, in the sheer joy of knowing Him together, daily, constantly.
May this become the issue of someone's age! Yes, the issue of the restoration of the experience of that beautiful thing called church.
You and I have no alternative if we plumb the infinite depths of Jesus Christ; eventually we will be driven to the issue of the life of the church. God's ultimate desire is not that you be rich and happy, or that you have a nice devotional life, or a thousand other things you might think. Reread the record. The passion, the centrality of the Scripture is Christ and the church. You and I cannot know Christ as we should without also knowing the living experience of the church.
You cannot have salvation without a living Christ. You cannot have the full ends of the deeper Christian life without a living experience of Christ and and living walk inside the experience of church life.
God simply set up His grand design with Christ and the church as the center. He made it the very nature of things. You can fight it if you chose. but cannot beat it; God made Christ and the church central. The fact is in the very bloodstream of the universe. You can try some other approach, but it won't work. You are moving against God's designs. Christ and the church are the sum total of God's schemes. The universe flows in that direction; any other way is upstream.
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