Why I Am A Member of the Church of Christ

First, I am appreciative to God that I had a God-fearing mother who did her best to raise her children in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.  She taught my siblings and I the importance of reading the bible for ourselves and learning to live our lives according to its teachings. Even as a young fourteen-year-old young man, I enjoyed reading the bible and reading the stories of biblical characters such as Moses and Abraham.  I believed that my understanding of God’s word at that time was based entirely on biblical facts supported by the bible and not solely on the thinking of the religious leaders in our family and the church.   

One day my older brother’s boss asked my mother if she would be interested in studying the bible and learning more about Jesus Christ and his church.  Being a devout believer in God, she gladly accepted but made it clear that we would also be a part of the study. After several classes within a span of three weeks, I began to realize that Christ was the founder of only one church and not the founder of the multiplicity of churches that are currently in existence. Please do not misunderstand me, I am not trying to knock what anyone believes, but I must speak where the bible speaks and be silence where the bible is silent.   As I searched and studied the Bible, I just could not justify the finding of more than one church that Christ said He would build.  It is a simple fact that Jesus told his disciples that he was going to build a church and not churches, and He told them that the gates of hell will not prevail against it (Matthew 16: 17-18) and not them.  I just do not understand how to get them out of my and it.

 Based on my knowledge of English, my is created from the personal pronoun I which makes it a possessive personal pronoun that denotes ownership. it is a singular pronoun that refers to one thing, person, or entity.  Therefore, the only sound biblical conclusion I could reach was that Christ is not the author of the confusion regarding His church because He made it clear that He is the founder of only one church.    We read in Ephesians 5:23 that the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior.  Lastly, the church is represented as the bride of Christ to show his covenant relationship between himself and those who have obeyed his gospel and who have been added to his church family.  And since Christ is only coming back for His church, not churches, to present it, not them, to himself as a glorified church (Ephesians 5:27), that is why I am a member of his body, the Church of Christ.