Church, community, sects and personal empires

When we think of "church" we may think of a specific gathering of people, building, or denomination. However,  in the Bible, there is only one church, and it is global, diverse, and centred around Jesus Christ.

Eugene Peterson reflects on the centrality of community in the third section of Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places: A Conversation in Spiritual Theology 

“When I became a pastor I didn’t think much about the complexities of community… I didn’t come to the conviction easily, but finally there was no getting around it: there can be no maturity in the spiritual life, no obedience in following Jesus, no wholeness in the Christian life apart from an immersion and embrace of community. I am not myself by myself. Community, not the highly vaunted individualism of our culture, is the setting in which Christ is at play.” 

 p.226

“The Bible furnishes us with a rich vocabulary that gives texture to the bare term “community”: people, people of God, congregation, great congregation, church, chosen people, royal priesthood, temple, family, body, commonwealth.”

The church is notorious for divisions. Just look at the list on Wikipedia of scores of different Baptist denominations, particularly in the USA! Today most of the largest and fastest-growing churches are independent churches, often centred around a single personality. We may tend to use the word "sect" to refer to an obscure and weird religious cult. Peterson uses the word sect in the sense of denomination, division, or niche Christian group.

“A sect is a front for narcissism. We gather with other people in the name of Jesus, but we predefine them according to our own tastes and predispositions. This is just a cover for our individualism: we reduce the community to conditions congenial to our imperial self.”

“The sectarian impulse is strong in all branches of the church because it provides such a convenient appearance of community without the difficulties of loving people we don’t approve of, or letting Jesus pray us into relationship with the very men and women we’ve invested a good bit of time avoiding.” 

“A sect is accomplished by community reduction, getting rid of what does not please us, getting rid of what offends us, whether ideas or people. We construct religious clubs instead of entering resurrection communities.” 

p. 244