From Dan Roukema’s message, November 16, 2025
At The Table, we’ve spent this season walking through the Nicene Creed line by line—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—and we now arrive at the final “we believe”:
“We believe in one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church.”
For many of us, those words feel… complicated.
“We believe in the church”?
Shouldn’t we say we believe that there is a church? Doesn’t believing in the church risk idolatry or naïveté?
Especially when many of us know firsthand the harm and betrayal that sometimes occurs within the church.
Yet the Creed insists: we believe in the church.
Not because we believe in ourselves—far from it. Not because we imagine the church to be sinless—history proves otherwise.
But because the church is God’s doing, not ours.
Jesus himself promises, “I will build my church, and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.”
To confess belief in the church is to confess belief in what God is doing through a broken people.
To help us see this more clearly, the Creed uses four ancient words to describe the church. Each of them points to a different facet of God’s work among us.
1. The Church Is One
“There is one loaf; we who are many are one body, for we all share the one loaf.”
— 1 Corinthians 10:17
Our unity does not come from shared personality, preference, ethnicity, citizenship, or ideology. Christian unity is not a project we form—“Let’s build a team of people who believe the same things!” It is a gift.
We are one because we all drink from the same well—Christ himself.
We are one because we share one baptism and one Spirit.
We are one because Jesus has bound us together in his own life.
This unity is invisible and indestructible. We can act against it—we often do through division, slander, and suspicion—but we cannot finally break it. Christ does not break communion with us, and therefore our communion with one another is never truly severed.
Our calling, then, is simple and challenging:
Make every effort to preserve the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.
(Ephesians 4:2–3)
At The Table, our very name reminds us that we are many—but we share one loaf.
Unity is God’s gift. Preserving it is our practice.
2. The Church Is Holy
This may be the most unbelievable claim of all.
Every Christian you have ever met is a sinner. Every congregation in history has stumbled, hurt others, and failed to live up to its calling. And yet Paul begins 1 Corinthians—written to a deeply dysfunctional church—by calling them:
“those sanctified in Christ Jesus and called to be his holy people.”
Holiness does not mean “sinless.”
Holiness means set apart by God.
The church is holy because God has taken hold of it.
The church is holy because Christ is joined to it.
The church is holy because the Holy Spirit dwells within it.
As Augustine famously said, “The church is a hospital for sinners”—a place where wounded people practice the medicine of daily repentance.
Through this union with Christ, God begins to reshape us over time—not through striving or moral heroism, but through the slow emergence of new desires. Like fruit growing unnoticed on a branch, holiness appears almost surprisingly.
Holiness is God’s doing. Our part is to guard one another, listen to the wounded, hold the abusive accountable, and walk in love.
3. The Church Is Catholic
Catholic here doesn’t mean Roman Catholic. It means universal.
Christianity is not the faith of one country or culture. It transcends borders, languages, and histories. Followers of Jesus gather in cities and villages on every continent, praying in thousands of tongues, embodying diverse expressions of worship—and yet anchored in the same gospel.
But catholicity goes deeper than global reach:
Anybody can join.
Jew or Gentile. Slave or free. Male or female.
Every person stands on equal footing before God (Galatians 3:28).
Eugene Peterson once said that a test for whether something can truly be called a church is this:
“Can a person not of your choosing join?”
The church is not a curated group of like-minded friends.
It is a public community—open, porous, welcoming—where God brings together people who would never naturally gather, and teaches them to work out their salvation together.
If our fellowship is only comfortable, predictable, or homogenous, we are missing the catholic dimension of Christ’s body.
4. The Church Is Apostolic
To be apostolic means we are connected to the apostles—
to their teachings, their witness, and the New Testament they handed down to us.
Protestants and Roman Catholics understand this differently. While Catholics emphasize a physical line of succession from Peter to today’s bishops, Protestants emphasize the confession Peter made:
“You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”
Jesus builds his church on this apostolic confession.
A church that is not rooted in the New Testament gospel is not a church.
And here again, this is God’s doing. Across generations, across languages, through ordinary humans, the Holy Spirit has faithfully preserved the apostolic message so that you and I can know Jesus. That same Spirit empowers us to pass on the good news today.
Why We Can Say “We Believe in the Church”
When we confess belief in the church, we are not believing in our own goodness or reliability. That would be foolish.
We are believing in God’s work—
in the One who makes the church one,
the One who makes the church holy,
the One who makes the church catholic,
the One who makes the church apostolic.
We are believing that the church—fragile, flawed, wounded, and redeemed—is God’s instrument of hope in the world.
So take yourselves seriously:
God has given you mystical union with Christ.
God has set you apart for holiness.
God has welcomed you into a global, diverse family.
God has entrusted you with the apostolic gospel.
And God is doing something beautiful with his church—even through us.
All glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit:
as it was in the beginning, is now, and will be forever. Amen.
The Table Church 