What is the True Church? by Arthur C. Zeppa

Where is “The True Church” found? Who composes it? What are some of its characteristics? How much bewilderment there is concerning it! Many seek a satisfactory answer. A Jewish gentleman and his son made a tour of many churches, resolved to join the “True Church” if they could find it: more perplexed about their relationship to God than indifferent to it. Others, confused by hundreds of denominations, are reading their Bibles and searching after Christ which is the greatest consideration.

To say association with the people of God is conditional to salvation and absence from the house of God is proof of lapse, the thoughtful reverently ask, “Where are they?” and, “Which is it?” Today even to Christians Paul’s word, “Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is,” (Hebrews 10:25), has its difficulties.

The “True Church” is not exclusively Catholic, Lutheran, Protestant, Methodist, Presbyterian or Independent. I asked a company of preachers, half seriously, if any of them could tell me the way to heaven. One replied, “Frankly, I fear not, as that is a special way and we are not that way.” To be nominally any kind of an “ist” excludes being vitally Christian, which is to be like Christ.

Whatever the name, form or government, wherever “The True Church” is found, I seek to write the truth to it in love: harsh criticism ill becomes the least worthy of all saints. Despite spiritual impotence God found the writer through one of the visible communions, in which he still remains.

Yet truth is incisive. New ideas are painful. The Word of God is a sharp sword. I write as far as I see, without conscious acridity towards any Church, for “Cowardice never manifested God.” Consequences will care for themselves. One wrote that “Today messages of truth were not half severe enough;” another, “This materialistic age needs a stiff jolt to awaken it.” The Church equally needs the jolt! Bishop Henderson said “There can be no conviction for sin in the world until there is first conviction for sin in the Church.” A greater said: “When He (the Spirit) is come, (unto you disciples), He will reprove the world of sin” (John 16:8).* [*But He came to abide in “The True Church” at Pentecost and though oft grieved, has never left it (John 14:16). It may offer Christ’s atonement to sinners with the assurance His work of reproof has faithfully been done.] The omnipresent Spirit is not everywhere equally manifested. He sovereignly convicts the world of sin but more particularly through the spiritual Church: “God is greatly to be feared in the congregation of the righteous.” Conversely: “Where there is no vision the people perish” or “cast off restraint.”

The Church’s great light and privilege fixes its great responsibility, the world’s degree of conviction being proportionate to its possession by the Spirit: “That servant which knew His Lord’s will,” and did it not, “shall be beaten with many stripes.” “But he that knew not,...shall be beaten with few stripes” (Luke 12:47-48). “Unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall much be required.” “To him that knoweth to do good, and doeth it not, to him it is sin” (James 4:17).

Arthur C. Zepp.
1410 North La Salle Street,
Chicago,
Illinois.

CrossReach Publications