One of UCCF's six values is 'Committed to the local church: believing it is the primary and life-long place of Christian ministry and discipleship.'
Here, Fearghal Kelly, South East Team Leader, shares why this is one of our core values.
Of course, the church matters! The local church is the primary place for lifelong ministry and discipleship. We can take that as given, can’t we?
As Martin Luther said, ‘A child seven years old knows what the church is, namely, the holy believers and the lambs that hear their Shepherd’s voice.’1 Yet what we take as a given can soon be taken for granted.
Why church?
Arriving at university, I was eager to find a church. Personal spiritual growth is a community project, after all. The Christian Union was an unfamiliar idea to me but the CU’s vision helped me value the local church with greater clarity.
The church is the object of God’s rescue plan – a people for His own possession. The church is an assembly to Christ in heaven (Hebrews 12:22-24) regardless of geography. ‘The one holy universal church is the Body of Christ, to which all true believers belong.’2
Yet in the Book of Acts, Christians gathered in an upper room (Acts 1), and soon spread out (Acts 8:3) throughout Judea, Galilee, Samaria (Acts 9:31) and beyond (Romans 16:5; 1 Corinthians 16:19; Colossians 4:15). The universal is expressed locally.
Terry Virgo captures the story well: ‘In Matthew 28:18-20 Jesus commissioned his disciples to ‘go and make disciples of all nations.’ The disciples obeyed this command by planting churches.’3 John Calvin explains, ‘Wherever we see the Word of God purely preached and heard, and the sacraments administered according to Christ’s institution, there, it is not to be doubted, a church of God exists.’4
CU is unique; local church is essential
The reason I joined CU as a student and work with UCCF now is because CUs are a one-of-a-kind community for focused evangelism, discipleship, and making friends across churches. When I sit in prayer meetings of local church student workers excitedly hearing from students and praying with passion, it’s because they see it too.
CUs are parallel to the local church (‘para-church’), but God’s universal church has always included believers who group together for a focused task to serve His wider church. CUs are launchpads for on-campus mission in ways that no one local church can be. No organisation outside of the university is entitled to operate on campus like students can. University-wide evangelism would be a lot more fragmented and many campuses would remain hard to reach otherwise.
However, CUs can’t substitute for local churches. In church, of course, you can find common ground with someone three times your age, help teach younger generations and befriend families who can feed you meals and burst the ‘student bubble’. Crucially, CUs have no appointed ministry of word, sacrament, and discipline – marks of a local church – and must not pretend to. CUs cannot replicate the pastoral oversight, sacramental life, and a doctrinal definition of local churches. So we must work in partnership with local churches to ensure students are fully integrated into the Body of Christ.
UCCF’s ministry seeks to lead students to the Church universal and therefore the church local. Just as ignoring CUs would seriously curtail the evangelisation of Britain’s universities, so CUs who ignore the local church sincerely miss the purpose of their mission. I’ve sometimes heard students rightly promote churches to new students by mistakenly downplaying CUs in the process. There’s no need to compare when we can commit with clarity.
Living out this commitment
Disconnection between CUs and local churches is tragic, but CU commitment to the local church is beautiful.
CUs can foster church unity in prayer, mission, and friendship – through big UCCF gatherings, a CU’s events week working shoulder-to-shoulder in the city, or interns from different churches cooking at a CU weekend away.
Students’ creativity, gifts, and fresh perspectives can bring vitality to a church. My CU experience directly impacted my ability to serve my church. As an elder at my church now, the friends I’ve made through UCCF from a breadth of churches have taught me things that influence how I think about my role serving my church.
Without the local church, students lack support and accountability to mature in Christ. The local church is ground-zero for students’ spiritual formation that goes on beyond their university years. CU mission would not happen without the support of local churches: BBQing for events, sending fantastic speakers, giving generously of their finances, passing round prayer requests, opening their buildings, and more.
Simply put, our commitment to the local church describes our desire for students to live as Christians! By partnering with local churches, we can provide students with a holistic and robust discipleship and focus for their mission that prepares them for a lifetime of faith and service. In doing so, we are obeying Christ’s command to make disciples of all nations.
1 Smalcald Articles, III, 12
2 uccf.org.uk/about/doctrinal-basis
3 thebroadcastnetwork.org/lessons/the-priority-of-church-planting-in-gods-mission
4 Institutes, IV.i.9
This article was written by Fearghal Kelly, South East Team Leader. It was first published in our termly magazine, Impact. Sign up today to receive the next edition by post.