The Purpose of Building a Church (1)

Having looked at the Foundation of building a Church (Leadership) and the Approach to that process (Discipleship), we look the Purpose of building (Maturity) in Ephesians 4:13-14: Till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ: That we henceforth be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men, and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive.

When a builder starts constructing a house, his goal is to get it completed, to have a finished product. Likewise, the purpose of building Christians is a finished product. That doesn’t mean literal perfection, that is, without error—no house is perfect—but it does mean complete in the sense of maturity. There will always be maintenance, but the basic structure is sound, solid, and secure.

In this context the word perfect means “a complete mature adult.” What, then, does spiritual maturity involve? What constitutes a mature Christian? Paul provides us with three characteristics of spiritual maturity: unity, knowledge, and discernment.

We cannot help but believe that the order in which these characteristics are listed is significant. Since unity is the subject of the entire context (vs. 1-16), it is, therefore, listed first. But unity of what?—unity of the faith. We studied “one faith” back in verse 5. The word faith is not used there, or here, as a verb but a noun and pictures “a system of truth.” More specifically, “the faith” and “one faith” refer to “the body of revealed truth which makes us Historical, Evangelical Christianity” (Jude 3). So, this tells us that God’s truth is unified; it is not fragmented or divided; it is one complete system.

Moreover, since this is listed first, God wants this to be the number one concern of the Church; our concern must be the unity of the Body around the unity of the faith.

The application of all this is clear. Unity among God’s people is the number one goal of edification, the number one goal of the building process. We are told by some Christian leaders that the number one goal is to “get big,” to add more people to the membership. But what good is a big body if it’s not unified? Indeed, we want to see the body get larger, and it will do that as we are faithful, but the first goal is to see the existing body in a constant state of unity. Why do we build up one another? So there will be unity and sweet fellowship among all members of Christ’s body. How do we go about this? By practicing the three principles we examined in verse 12: equipping, serving, and building. This leads to the second characteristic of maturity, which we’ll consider next time.