Who and What is the Church Part 2 – by Greg Albrecht

Friend and Partner Letter from October 2026

This is the second installment – the second in a two-part series titled “Who and What is The Church.” To read “Who and What is The Church Part 1,” click here.

Some of my most treasured memories goes back over 70 years ago, to a small farm in South East Texas. During school breaks in second and third grade I often visited my cousins for weeks at a time “on the farm.” Everything “on the farm” stopped when the smell of fresh baked bread wafted out of the open windows of my Aunt Esther’s kitchen. My cousins and I made a “beeline” for the kitchen and found a place at the long table. Aunt Esther sliced the loaves of her incredible bread, and we would slather the generously sized piece of bread she served us with butter and jam. I have loved all kinds of bread from that moment on.

In “biblical times” the word bread described what the word means to us today – a specific type of food made with basic and common ingredients – but it also described food in general which provided provision and survival for physical bodies. Many biblical references provide a thought-provoking contrast – physical bread sustains physical life, while spiritual bread, Jesus, the Bread of Life, imparts eternal life, as he lives his risen life within us.

I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, yet they died. Yet here is the bread that comes down from heaven, which anyone may eat and not die (John 6:48-50).

The next time you visit a supermarket, stop and ponder when you arrive at the aisle featuring bread. There are so many types of bread – white, rye, pumpernickel, sourdough, brown, gluten-free, unleavened flatbread, including tortillas. Let’s not forget ciabattas, cornbread, brioche, bagels, challah, naan, baguettes and soda bread. Then there are healthy origin-brands, touting their superior bread making methods and trumpeting their wholesome ingredients. There are thin-sliced, gluten-free, sodium free, 100% whole grain, multi-grain and organic breads. And, there’s even a brand that calls itself Ezekiel 4:9 sprouted grain bread – look it up, and you will find Ezekiel 4:9 specifies specific ingredients for the bread God directed Ezekiel to bake. On a particular occasion (read carefully – originally) God directed Ezekiel to bake the bread using human excrement as fuel. Ezekiel objected and God allowed cow dung to be used.

What does bread have to do with the body of Christ?

The aisle in the supermarket displaying a staggering choice of breads is a little like Christless churchianity in 21st century North America. When many dare visit a religious supermarket (let the buyer beware!) looking for a healthy, well-balanced church they are searching for a pleasant, yet wholesome brick and mortar religious destination. By contrast, when one shops in a physical supermarket in the United States one has the support of The Food and Drug Administration (in Canada the Canadian Food Inspection Agency) to ensure “truth in advertising.” Laws protect consumers of physical bread, mandating that ingredients are clearly printed on plastic or paper bags in which bread is sold.

But when one ventures into the wilderness of Christless religion, shopping in a religious supermarket looking for Bread from heaven, one finds no agency empowered to provide truth in advertising. In fact, laws protecting religion and religious freedom (thank God for them!) expressly prohibit any government agency from deeming one church or religion to be spiritually healthy while determining another to be toxic to spiritual health. Thus, the ungoverned, relentless beat goes on in Christless religion. The plastic and paper bags in which un-Christlike, spiritually unhealthy bread is sold include some claims that are at best, “exaggerated truth claims” (a fancy way of defining a fable, a misrepresentation, a falsehood, or a down-right lie!)

Some Christless labels, covertly at least and sometimes overtly, romance the would-be consumer promising that this spiritual bread is the “true church” – a few even boldly dare to advertise themselves as the “one and only true church.”

The “Non-Conforming Separatists” in England were brave, Christ-centered folks, practicing their Protestant faith in the immediate generations following the Protestant Reformation. They did not limit their spiritual choices to the conforming, institutionally approved, mega-church or mega-religion offered to them. I love their courage and faith as they rejected big business “factory made” spiritual nourishment, which they perceived as containing many unhealthy and even toxic spiritual ingredients. Non-Conforming Separatists in England repudiated the authority of the national church, the Church of England.  The Separatists felt, among other things, the totalitarian, authoritarian and regimented hierarchy of the Church of England stifled what they believed to be freedom in Christ. The Separatists did not “do church” as many other Christians in the immediate years following the beginning of the Protestant Reformation in 1517, and in fact they were a product of this earthquake-like transformation of faith which continued for a generation or two.  

The Separatists felt that faith was more personal, a choice, and involved following Jesus Christ to the best of their abilities, which meant rejection of the hierarchy of both the Roman Catholic Church and the Church of England. One of the prominent Separatists of the day was an Englishman named John Robinson (1575-1625). He had actually moved his congregation from Norwich, England, to Holland, but even in Holland his congregation felt religious oppression stifling their lives as Christ-followers. 

It was in Holland that William Bradford, a co-minister who served with John Robinson, gave this specific group the biblical name by which they are known in history – “strangers and pilgrims on the earth” (Hebrews 11:13, KJV). Thus many of the English Separatists wound up being called Puritans and Pilgrims, and eventually made their way to New England in the United States, some on the Mayflower, as it reached the coast of Massachusetts in November 21, 1620.   

While John Robinson himself was in ill health and could not make the voyage to a New World, with many Separatists seeing North American to be their promised land, in 1619 he gave a sermon to many in his congregation just before they left.  Here is an oft-quoted excerpt:

“I charge you before God and his blessed angels to follow me no further than you have seen me follow Christ… The Lutherans cannot be drawn to go beyond what Luther saw. Whatever part of his will our God has revealed to Calvin, they [Lutherans] will rather die than embrace it; and the Calvinists, you see, stick fast where they were left by that great man of God, who yet saw not all things. This is a misery to be lamented. For though they were precious shining lights in their time, yet God has not revealed his whole will to them. And were they now living, they would be willing to embrace further light, as they had received.” 

In the excerpts (above) of his sermon titled “Farewell at Delfshaven” John Robinson is not bashing two major theological church movements of his era, nor is he finding fault with the two great Reformers whose name was attached to those movements, but he is saying:

1) Follow me no further than you see me following Jesus Christ, and

2) Christ-followers are continually growing in Christ, by the grace of God, thus there are no unassailable, never-to-be-questioned credal truths nor any religious authority figure that stands above study and questioning. Truth is Jesus – Jesus lives within us – and we, in Christ, continually mature in him. 

The Truth was truth then, and the Truth is still the truth now – in the name of Jesus, who is “the way and the truth and the life” (John 14:6).  He IS our Rock. In Christ alone we stand, all else is sinking sand!

Greg Albrecht
President, Plain Truth Ministries

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