By Seth Erlandsson, in Biblicum 4-5/1977. Translated by Julius Buelow.

Can you start a brand new church?

It’s important to distinguish between a new “church” and a new church organization. [Translator: Sometimes we distinguish between the invisible church, which is all believers of all time, and visible churches, which are outward organizations formed by those believers]. When Martin Luther was forced to break with the Roman Catholic church he was accused by their leaders of creating a new church. He answered, in part:

We have remained faithful to the old church; it is you who have fallen away from us. We have the baptism Christ instituted. We have the Holy Sacrament of the Altar just as Christ instituted it. We teach and preach in accordance with God’s pure word and do not add any of our own man-made teachings. We remain faithful to the old Word of God which the old church had. Therefore, the papists slander Christ himself, the apostles and all Christendom, when they call us a new church. The holy Church cannot and will not tolerate false teaching. It must teach only what is holy and true, that is, only God’s Word. When it teaches lies, it has become ungodly and an adulterous church of the Devil (against Hans Wurst, 1541).

One can clearly delineate and spell out that religious fellowship (the communion of saints), according to the Bible, presupposes unity in biblical teaching. A church that tolerates a plurality of teaching, that is, a church without discipline in doctrine, is, according to the New Testament, no true church. If a certain church organization does not correct itself and conduct itself according to the Bible, but—despite the protests and warnings of those faithful to the true confession—tolerates unbiblical things, it has ceased to be a church in the biblical sense. It has become a sect (= cut off from God’s Word) and must be abandoned by those who make up the true church (Matthew 7:15, Romans 16:17).

The church is those who remain in Christ’s Word (John 8:31), not those who cling to a certain church organization despite its unfaithfulness to the Bible. Christians are called to work together and practice religious fellowship only with such church organizations which are built on “the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus as the cornerstone” (Eph 2:20). False teaching, which arises on occasion, does not change a faithful church into a heretical and false church. But if the false teaching is not confronted and subject to doctrinal discipline—if instead it is allowed within that particular church organization, then it has become a heretical or false church, which must be abandoned.