You Can’t Love the Church in Theory and Keep Avoiding It in Real Life

Christianity Today’s May 13 essay “You Can’t Love the Church in the Abstract” exposes one of the most respectable evasions in modern Christianity. It is easy to say you love the church universal — the body of Christ, the bride, the people of God across space and time. It is much harder to love the actual local congregation in front of you: the flawed people, odd habits, awkward meetings, unmet expectations, and ordinary obligations that come with belonging somewhere real.

That difficulty is not accidental.

For many modern Christians, abstraction has become a refuge. We talk about “the church” warmly while remaining detached from churches concretely. We say we care about Christian community while keeping one foot out the door. We admire the idea of spiritual belonging while resisting the inconvenience of particular people, particular places, and particular commitments. CT’s essay presses on that tension by insisting that Scripture does not merely call believers to appreciate the church in principle. It calls them to love the church in practice.

This matters because abstraction is one of the defining temptations of the age.

Digital life makes everything scalable, conceptual, portable, and lightly held. It becomes easier to identify with causes than with neighbors, with ideals than with institutions, with broad visions than with bodies. The same thing happens spiritually. Christians can consume sermons, theological podcasts, online liturgies, and social media commentary all week and still remain only thinly attached to an actual congregation.

That arrangement can feel spiritually rich for a while. But over time it becomes a form of insulation.

An abstract church never disappoints you the way a real one can. It never asks you to forgive a difficult person. It never expects your time. It never inconveniences your schedule. It never exposes whether your love for “community” includes patience, loyalty, submission, or service.

And that is exactly the problem.

Because Christianity has always been stubbornly local. The body of Christ is cosmic, yes — but it is also embodied in gathered people, in named elders, in shared meals, in mutual care, in burdens carried, in worship attended, in the irritating and holy business of becoming faithful with others over time. The universal church is glorious. But believers usually learn to love it by learning to love the nearby one first.

This is especially important for modern Christians who have been hurt, disillusioned, or spiritually overexposed online. Many have good reasons for caution. Some have experienced hypocrisy, abuse, or manipulation. Others are simply exhausted by shallow church consumerism and want something truer. But even those very real concerns can harden into a pattern where detachment starts masquerading as discernment.

That is why the CT argument is useful.

It does not romanticize local churches. It simply insists that Christian love does not get to stay theoretical forever. You cannot keep praising the body of Christ while treating actual congregations as optional background scenery. If love is real, it eventually must take the form of attendance, patience, generosity, service, and stubborn commitment to imperfect people.

Modern Christianity needs this reminder because it lives in a time of high ecclesial suspicion and low institutional loyalty. That suspicion is not always irrational. But if it becomes total, believers lose one of the main arenas in which God ordinarily forms them. The local church is not merely a delivery system for religious goods. It is one of the ordinary places where grace becomes visible through proximity, repetition, conflict, correction, worship, and shared life.

And you cannot get most of that from abstraction.