Advancing the gospel across the holy gospel rub. Help strengthen the global church with gospel-centered resources. The universal church is a heavenly and eschatological assembly of everyone—past, present, and future—who belongs to Christ’s new covenant and kingdom.
New Testament envisions two kinds of assemblies: one in heaven and many on earth. These two kinds are the universal and local church, respectively. To become a Christian is to become a member of the universal church, whereby God raises us up with Christ and seats us in the heavenly place. A brand-new Christian who begins reading the Bible might find him or herself initially confused trying to answer that question. Turning to Paul’s epistles similarly reveals two different uses of the word.
Yet Scripture employs the word to refer to two kinds of assembly: a heavenly one and an earthly one. Christians refer to these as the universal church and the local church, respectively. By the new covenant, Jesus Christ secured not just individuals but a people for himself, all of which he accomplished through his life, death, and resurrection. Yet by uniting a people to him, he also united them to one another. Peter places the second line about receiving God’s saving mercy in parallel with the first line about becoming God’s people. To be adopted by a father and mother is to receive—derivatively but simultaneously—a new set of brothers and sisters. And this is the universal church—all the new brothers and sisters we have received from across time and around the world who belong to this new covenant people.
Why then say that the universal church is in heaven? By our union with Christ we are seated in the heavens, meaning, we possess standing and a place in God’s heavenly throne room. All the prerogatives and protections of that place belong to us because we are sons and daughters of the king. You have come to—the heavenly Jerusalem—to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant. Again, how is it that the saints on earth could be assembled in heaven even now? Before the judgment seat of God, they have been declared perfect through Christ’s new covenant.
There, in heaven, God counts all the saints, living and dead, as possessing standing. Definition 1: the universal church is a heavenly and eschatological assembly of everyone—past, present, and future—who belongs to Christ’s new covenant and kingdom. This is the church that Jesus promised to build in Matthew 16. This is the entire body of Christ, the family of God, and temple of the Spirit. It’s a heavenly position or status in God’s courtroom. It is therefore as real as anything else in or beyond the universe.
In other words, our membership in Christ’s universal and heavenly body cannot remain an abstract idea. If it is real, it will show up on earth—in real time and space with real people, people with names like Betty and Saeed and Jamar, people we don’t get to choose but who step on our toes and disappoint us and encourage us and help us to follow Jesus. Membership in the universal church must become visible in a local gathering of Christians. Consider what this means: if a person says he belongs to the church but he has nothing to do with a church, one might rightly to wonder if he really does belong to the church, just as we wonder about a person who claims to have faith but has no deeds.
The local church is where we see, hear, and literally rub shoulders with the universal church—no, not all of it, but an expression of it. It is a visible, earthly outpost of the heavenly assembly. It is a time machine which has come from the future, offering a preview of this end-time assembly. Every nation and kingdom possess some way of saying who their citizens are. Today, countries use passports and borders.
Ancient Israel used both circumcision and Sabbath-keeping, signs of the Abrahamic and Mosaic Covenant, respectively. The church is not presently a land-possessing earthly kingdom, yet this heavenly kingdom needs some way of affirming it citizens on earth, too. Not only that, he gave local churches the authority to publicly affirm their members as citizens of his kingdom—to affix these covenantal signs on people, almost like a coach passing out team jerseys. So definition 2: a local church is a mutually-affirming group of new covenant members and kingdom citizens, identified by regularly gathering together in Jesus’ name through preaching the gospel and celebrating the ordinances.
Jesus describes this gathered local church in Matthew 18. It is an expression of the body of Christ, the family of God, and temple of the Spirit. Early Church History: Leaning Toward the Universal Church Through the history of the church, different individuals and traditions have emphasized either the universal or the local church. In the first generations following the apostles, the emphasis rightly fell on both, at least as judged by early letters to churches and their leaders by pastors like Clement of Rome and Ignatius. The second-century document the Didache suggests likewise, with its dual emphasis on the practical workings of a local church and Christian faithfulness more broadly. Yet just as people sometimes shift their weight off of both feet and onto one, so the writings of the church fathers moving into the third, fourth, and fifth centuries presents a growing emphasis on the universal church, albeit in an institutional guise. There were historical reasons for this.