I have preached 1 Corinthians 12 more times than I can count. I have preached it at staff retreats with lukewarm coffee and chairs arranged in a circle that no one wanted to sit in. I have preached it at volunteer-appreciation dinners, between the baked ziti and the certificates. I have preached it to a teenager in my office who could not stop crying and wanted to know if she mattered. Every time, I said roughly the same thing: The church is like a body. We all have different gifts. The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you.” Find your role. Play your part. Do your thing.
All this is true. And nearly all of it is also very thin. It is thin the way a postcard of the Grand Canyon is thin—accurate enough, as far as it goes, but what it leaves out is the depth, the dizzying scale, the holy terror of standing at the edge of something that does not care whether you are ready for it.
For years, I preached Paul’s most radical claim about the nature of the church while reducing it to a motivational poster for volunteerism. I was not alone in this. The phrase shows up everywhere in evangelical life. It’s in our leadership books, our vision statements, and websites. And nearly everywhere it appears, it has been drained of almost everything Paul put into it. At the same time, we find ourselves fracturing along every imaginable line: race, politics, theology, and sometimes even class.
My aim here is to argue—carefully, and from within the Reformed tradition that I love—that when Paul calls the church “the body of Christ,” he means something far stranger, far more demanding, and far more beautiful than what we have allowed him to mean. He is not merely reaching for a metaphor. He is making a claim about what is real—about who Christ is, who we are in him, and what it means concretely for the risen Son of God to remain present in the world through a people. If that claim is true, it should shake up how we practice church, not eventually but now.
Throughout the New Testament, Paul has a lot to say about the church. To the believers at Corinth, he writes, “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ” (1 Cor. 12:12, ESV throughout). So it is with Christ. Not “so it is with the church,” which could have been the analogy. But Paul says Christ.
He had already laid the foundation for this statement six chapters earlier, saying sexual immorality is bad not on abstract moral grounds but based on the body: “Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ?” (6:15). The argument, however, only works if “body of Christ” is not a mere metaphor. Our bodies truly belong to Christ, and by the Spirit, we are united to the risen Lord in such a way that what we do in our bodies is done as members of him.
It is no accident that between chapters 6 and 12, Paul gives his most-extended teaching on the Lord’s Supper: “The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread” (10:16–17). At the table, Christians participate in their union with Christ while remembering his broken body and confessing the life they now share (11:26).
From here, the conclusion is, again, not a metaphor. “Now you are the body of Christ,” Paul concludes, “and individually members of it” (12:27). Not “you are like a body.” You are the body. A present tense statement of fact about the deepest reality of the existence of the church. Sever any link in that chain, and Paul’s claim thins into illustration.
Paul is equally insistent in Ephesians: “And he put all things under his feet and gave him as head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all” (1:22–23). John Calvin, no mystic and no sentimentalist, read this verse and wrote something that should stop us in our tracks:
This is the highest honour of the Church, that, until He is united to us, the Son of God reckons himself in some measure imperfect. What consolation is it for us to learn, that, not until we are along with him, does he possess all his parts, or wish to be regarded as complete!
The Son of God, who fills all in all, “reckons himself in some measure” imperfect apart from his church? Yes. Not because Christ lacks anything in his divine nature but because he has chosen, in the mystery of the Incarnation, to bind himself so completely to a ragged, beautiful, maddening community of people that he will not be regarded as complete without us.
Various theologians, spanning from Thomas F. Torrance and Dietrich Bonhoeffer to contemporary academics like Simon Chan, have affirmed this view of the church. Some evangelicals might feel it gets too close to mysticism. But it is incarnational theology carried to its conclusion. The whole meaning of in-carna-tion, to be made into flesh, to be embodied, is that God entered bodily existence. And the force of our union with Christ means this bodily existence now includes ours.
Let me be precise here. To say the church is Christ’s body is not to collapse the distinction between Creator and creature. It is not to divinize the church. Christ is not reducible to the church any more than the head is reducible to the body. That distinction between head and members remains and must remain, or we turn ecclesiology into idolatry.
But saying the church is Christ’s body means, by the Spirit, our visible community genuinely carries Christ’s presence in the world. That’s why the grounds of our unity are not a comparison drawn from human anatomy but a person: the risen, incarnate Son of God.
If we take Paul at his word—and I mean seriously enough to let it rearrange the furniture of our churches, our budgets, and our consciences—several things about our common life come into sharper focus.
First, racial division becomes a crisis of Christ’s body. In Ephesians 2, Paul writes that Christ “has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility” (v. 14). The reconciliation of Jew and Gentile was accomplished in and through the body of Christ on the cross. To claim reconciliation with God while maintaining division from one another is, in Paul’s logic, incoherent.
But the history of the American church shows people have long tried to resurrect what Christ has torn down. If we really internalized the dividing wall came down in Christ’s flesh, Sunday morning would not revolve around preference or familiarity but would feel, quietly and stubbornly, like a gathering of distinct voices displaying Christ.
Furthermore, reconciliation events and discussions would not sit on the calendar as a program. Instead, we would have a posture of reconciliation. Congregants in the pew would not merely share theological convictions. They would share one another—bearing difference not as threat but as evidence of what crucified flesh had accomplished. And the unity on display would be explained not by affinity, taste, tribe, or strategy but by a Lord killed in the flesh and raised to gather strangers into one body.
We have already seen what this looks like. We can point to one example from 1906, at Azusa Street in Los Angeles. An interracial revival broke out under the leadership of William Seymour, a Black holiness preacher whose parents were once slaves. The revival violated every racial norm of Jim Crow as worshipers of all shades knelt at the same altar. Unfortunately, their gathering did not last. Charles Parham, Seymour’s former mentor, arrived and demanded segregation. Seymour refused and the fracture that followed between the two men persists within Pentecostalism to this day.
That story stays with me because it suggests that the body of Christ, when it functions the way Paul describes, is so disruptive that even Christians will reach for the saw. The story also suggests the Spirit keeps reassembling what we keep trying to pull apart.
Second, if we take Paul at his word, our treatment of the vulnerable becomes a statement about Christ. Here’s one verse that is almost never preached: “The parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable” (1 Cor. 12:22). Paul does not say the weaker parts deserve sympathy. He says they are indispensable. The body cannot function without them.
Research shows nearly one in three parents who have children with disabilities say they left their places of worship because they felt their children were not included or welcomed. The data we have cuts across various religions and isn’t tailored to the church. But it does include responses from Christian and evangelical parents.
Inside the church, the barriers when it comes to disability are often less about ramp access than about imagination: worship services designed with no thought for sensory differences, small groups that assume everyone processes language at the same speed, a theology of gifts that treats cognitive ability as the measure of contribution. When a congregation fails to meaningfully include these members, it is not simply falling short on hospitality. It is essentially telling Christ’s body it can function without parts he has called essential.
Third, Paul’s words make clear that every Christian is already a church member (v. 27). Emphasizing this could shift how people think about local gatherings in an age when attendance is casual and commitment negotiable. A body does not operate on preference or convenience. It does not have members who come and go at the whim of comfort. The presence of its members matters because their absence is felt. When a member withdraws, the body does not simply adjust its programming; it limps. Then, there’s the cost of Christian isolation. A hand that refuses to move with the body is not free. It is paralyzed.
Now, I should say here that this type of theology is costly. It costs us the freedom to choose whose pain we engage with. But the truth is, the pain of Christians already affects us. “If one member suffers,” Paul writes, “all suffer together” (v. 26). The only question is whether I will live inside that reality or pretend it is not true. The latter response is how “the body of Christ” becomes merely a teamwork illustration. But Paul’s real claim asks us to suffer with people we did not choose and regard the weakest among us not as a charity project but as structurally necessary to what Christ has formed.
So how do we then order our common life as though Paul is right? There are a lot of practical things we can do. We can teach church membership as covenant rather than convenience. We can examine our budgets, buildings, and Sunday-morning rhythms for the people who are absent and ask why. We can refuse to treat racial reconciliation as a silo project rather than a matter of the church’s bodily integrity. We can also practice the strangest Pauline conviction of all: that the person we find most difficult to love is not an obstacle to the body’s health but an essential part of it.
If the church really is what Paul says it is, Christ has not left us. He is still present, still embodied. And he has chosen, in the reckless mercy that characterizes everything he does, to be present in and through this fractured, faithful, and foolish collection of people who keep showing up on Sunday mornings and Wednesday evenings, in hospital rooms and around dinner tables. Our churches are the way the risen Christ has chosen to remain in the world.
Thomas Anderson is the pastor of disciple making at Grace Community Church in Fulton, Maryland.
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