The Indispensable Community
Herman Bavinck, Evangelical Individualism, and Why the Local Church Still Matters
I wrote on this topic for my Phd Seminar and tried to condense it down to a blog post! (I had AI help me pull quotes from my original paper).
“Religion cannot be purely individual and private.”(1)
Evangelicalism in America is facing a slow erosion, but not due to a lack of digital resources, podcasts, or parachurch content, but because many Christians have subtly traded covenantal communion for curated consumption. Amid this technological convenience and expressive individualism, the local church is increasingly viewed as an optional add-on to the Christian life rather than its essential context.
Some evangelicals now believe that growth in Christ can occur apart from the local body, mediated instead through content algorithms and livestreams. But can sanctification truly occur in isolation? Is such a notion biblically and theologically coherent?
Herman Bavinck offers a compelling corrective.
Rooted in the doctrines of the Trinity, covenant, and ecclesiology, Bavinck’s theological framework dismantles the myth of privatized holiness and provides a robust case for why sanctification requires active, participation in a local church. This post explores three essential pillars of Bavinck’s thought—Trinitarianism, covenantal anthropology, and the dual nature of the church as both organism and institution—and argues that the local church remains the indispensable context for growth in grace.
I. Trinitarian Foundations: The Image of God and the Necessity of Community
For Bavinck, the doctrine of the Trinity is not merely a point of orthodoxy, it is the architectonic principle of all Christian theology.(2) In the triune life of God, we find the eternal harmony of unity and diversity. This divine pattern is not only mirrored in creation but forms the ontological foundation for human relationships and community.
“Among us, unity exists only by attraction, by the will… it is a moral unity that is fragile and unstable.”(3)
Because humanity is created in the image of the triune God, no individual can fully reflect that image in isolation. The imago Dei is fundamentally communal: realized not in the solitary self, but in covenantal fellowship under Christ. The church, as the gathered people of God, becomes the eschatological arena in which humanity is renewed after this image.(4)
Thus, Bavinck’s Trinitarianism calls into question the entire apparatus of hyper-individualized Christianity. The Christian life cannot be disembodied, isolated, or self-directed, it must be ecclesial. It must take form among others.
II. Covenantal Anthropology: Sanctification as a Communal Project
Flowing from the Trinity is Bavinck’s doctrine of covenant, which provides both the structure and the telos of human life. “All higher life,” Bavinck writes, “takes the form of a covenant.”(5) From creation to consummation, human flourishing is framed within covenantal relationships: first with God, and second with one another.
This covenantal anthropology implies that sanctification, which is God’s gracious work of restoring fallen human nature, is not merely individual, but corporate. Grace, in Bavinck’s theology, restores nature, and this restoration unfolds in a covenantal community, namely, the local church.(6) Growth into Christlikeness is not achieved through solitary effort but by Spirit-mediated participation in a body that teaches, disciplines, corrects, forgives, and loves, and holds us accountable.
To be made whole in Christ is, therefore, to be grafted into His body, a truth that renders disembodied spiritualities not only insufficient but incoherent.
III. The Local Church: Organism and Institution in Union
Bavinck’s ecclesiology maintains that the church is both an organism, a living community united by faith, and an institution. A divinely ordered structure governed by Christ through Word and sacrament.
“The church is unthinkable without an authority that sustains, guides, cares for, and protects it.”(7)
These two aspects are not hierarchical but complementary. The organism without the institution lacks form and authority; the institution without the organism is lifeless formalism. It is within this dialectic that the church administers grace. Word and sacrament are not mere appendages to faith, they are the appointed means through which Christ mediates His covenantal rule.
This has profound implications. A livestream cannot baptize. A podcast cannot excommunicate. A TikTok theologian cannot administer the Lord’s Supper or shepherd your soul. Apart from Word and sacrament—administered in the visible body—there is no ordinary sanctifying grace.
IV. Sanctification Requires the Church
1. Spirit-Mediated Transformation
Bavinck is clear: the Spirit ordinarily works through the means of grace—particularly the preached Word and the sacraments. These are not private, mystical experiences, but public, embodied practices administered in covenantal community.
“It is not an act of piety to seek an immediate way of growth and sanctification.”(8)
To participate in these means is to be physically present, submitted to shepherds, and united to a people. As Bavinck consistently argues, God has sovereignly bound Himself to ordinary means.(9)
In an age of simulated spirituality and algorithmic religion, the material reality of the church reminds us that Christianity is an incarnational faith. Christ ministers His grace through a body—and that body is the church.
2. Communal Piety and Loving Discipline
Sanctification is not merely vertical (between the believer and God), but horizontal (within the community of saints). The New Testament’s vision of holiness assumes the presence of others: we forgive, exhort, submit, serve, and love in community.
Church discipline, far from being authoritarian, is Christ’s medicine for restoring wayward members and preserving the church’s unity:
“The catholicity of the church reveals itself in discipline.”(10)
To refuse the accountability of a local body is to refuse Christ’s governance. Piety without people is not biblical spirituality, it is spiritual delusion.
3. Ethical Formation in Real Life
Christian ethics are forged not in theory but in relationships. Patience, humility, generosity, forgiveness—these cannot be practiced in isolation. They require real people, in a real place, over real time.
Bavinck’s emphasis on the church as the “mother of believers”(11) highlights the formative nature of the congregation: it gives birth through the Word and nurtures through sacrament and discipline. As he argues, even imperfect churches are the very context where grace grows best.
“A true church in an absolute sense is impossible here on earth.”(12)
Which is precisely why we need it.
Even more, Communal worship and accountability cultivate ethical formation. John Murray claims that one of the most essential elements of biblical ethics is broadly union and communion with Christ.(13) How do we participate in this union and communion with Christ? It is in fellowship with His people; the believer partakes in the means of Grace. As John Frame argues, this union and communion with Christ is at the same time a union and communion with the Spirit.(14) This Spirit pours out grace, which motivates obedience.(15) Since the Spirit of God uses the means of Grace and it is ordinarily mediated through the local church, ethical formation in the life of the Christian necessitates meaningful membership in a local body.
Conclusion: Recovering the Indispensable Community
To neglect the local church is not merely unwise, it is to sever oneself from the very means by which Christ distributes His sanctifying grace.
Many today are spiritually anemic not because they lack access to content, but because they lack covenantal communion. They are “following Jesus,” but not walking with saints. They are consuming sermons, but not submitting to shepherds.
Bavinck reminds us: there is no Christ apart from His body, no sanctification apart from the saints, and no Christian maturity apart from the church.
The local congregation is not a lifestyle accessory. It is the indispensable community, the God-ordained, Spirit-indwelt, grace-administering body through which Christ is forming His people for glory.
📚 Footnotes
Herman Bavinck, quoted in Matthew Statler, Herman Bavinck and the Indispensable Community: The Local Congregation as Corrective to Evangelical Individualism in Sanctification, 2.
Ibid., 5.
Ibid., 5.
Ibid., 5–6.
Ibid., 7.
Ibid., 8.
Ibid., 10.
Ibid., 14.
Ibid., 14–15.
Ibid., 17.
Ibid., 11.
Ibid., 18.
John Murray, Principles of Conduct (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1957), 203.
John M. Frame, The Doctrine of the Christian Life, A Theology of Lordship (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2008), 914.
Ibid., 915.
Full Paper for those interested: https://www.icloud.com/iclouddrive/061SATrBDKYERRzb1ydXTi7DA#ECCPaper_copy