“The Church is Full of False Believers”

I was listening to local Christian radio this morning, and John MacArthur (Grace to You) came on. During his preaching MacArthur stated: The Church is full of false believers. In the context of his overall sermon I think I know what he meant; if so, he’s certainly correct. But I think this statement reveals what I see as the very problem with using the term “church”.

The word church has a number of meanings. It can refer to a building where people gather for services. It can strictly refer to the people making up said gathering. It can refer corporately to all those who gather in ‘church’ buildings across the world—such ‘church’ buildings can be individual homes or other buildings not usually associated with ‘church’ gatherings. It can refer to those making up the hierarchical structure of a given tradition or denomination. Yet the corporate Church is most often (solely?) meant to refer only to true believers—those who profess Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior and live as Scripture dictates. The latter would necessarily exclude “false believers”.

MacArthur seems to have meant a corporate sense. Thus, I might amend his statement to:

The Church has been infiltrated with many false believers.

Or perhaps better:

Many false believers have infiltrated the Church.

Jesus illustrates this very thing in His tares amongst the wheat parable (Matt 13:24–30). Using the terms in Jesus’ parable, we could amend it further to:

Many tares have been planted amongst the Wheat.

Such a statement is Biblically accurate and alleviates any ambiguity in the term church.¹

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¹ I’ve written more extensively about this issue of using church in an earlier blog post: Re-Assembly Required.