Have you by any chance contemplated the ever mysterious single shoe?  You know the one I am taking about.  This would be the solitary shoe that you inevitably see in the gutter as you drive to work, or maybe, for those so inclined, as you go on your daily constitutional.  I am sure every community has at least one of these shoes kicking around their streets.  You encounter this lone piece of footwear days on end, when all of a sudden it disappears.  However, you know it is not truly gone.  Inevitably in the course of time it either returns for round two, or it is supplanted by its brother from a different mother.  This is the phenomena of The Ever Mysterious Single Shoe.

Every time I encounter one of these curious shoes I am struck with the question of its origin.  Seriously, where do these things come from?  It’s not like someone went for a walk and arrived at their destination one shoe short of a pair.  I don’t care how lost you are in your own little world you would likely notice.  Does it belong to some one-footed man, who in a fit of rage, throws his lone shoe out the car window in protest of someone’s ill timed lane change?  Are there really that many one-footed men (or women, I don’t want to be sexist) who have the propensity of losing their shoes living amongst us?   My money is on fact that this is the dastardly work of the secret shoe society named Aglet.  Whatever the origin of these lone shoes, their continued existence is quite odd.

I would hazard a guess that almost everyone that has encountered one of these ever mysterious single shoes pondered the reason for it being there.  It is rather odd that we would be so interested in the backstory of an inanimate object, but we are.  Ultimately our curiosity is derived from our understanding that shoes in their natural state come in pairs.  A shoe on its own, well something is wrong with that picture.  Shoes were never meant to be alone (and all the women readers said “Amen”).  In the same way Christians in their natural state were never meant to walk out their own salvation alone.

I have noticed a disturbing trend, one in which individuals professing salvation through Jesus Christ are going it alone.  What I am trying to say is they place little to no priority on the assembly of the saints.  Just like the mysterious lone shoe, they too stand in contrast to their very nature.  They live as if being in Christ and church attendance are mutually exclusive.  From a soteriological standpoint this is absolutely true.  Our salvation is not dependent on anything other than God’s grace (Eph 2:8).  However, when it comes to maturing spiritually and progressing in sanctification the two by design go hand in hand (Prov 27:17, Heb 10:24-25).

What should not be overlooked is the fact that once we are placed in Christ we are also immediately engrafted into one united spiritual body, the Universal Church, the Bride of Christ.  The two are conjoined and can not be separated.  This is where most people who attempt to go it alone hang their hats.  They assume all they need is God and their Bible because they are already part of the Church Universal.  However,  the Bible also shows us that we will find the practical expression of this one universal body in the formation and continuation of local assemblies (Acts 2:42-47, Rev 2-3).  The local church is the vehicle through which Christ equips his saints for the work of the ministry through instruction of the Word, discipleship, fellowship, discipline, and mutual accountability (Eph 4:4-16).  When we willingly disregard God’s appointed vehicle arriving at his chosen destination becomes problematic.

Those who propose a “style” of Christianity that sidesteps commitment to a body of local believers is proposing something that is neither historical nor biblical.  The truth is we were never designed to walk out this new life and salvation on our own.  In God’s infinite wisdom he chose to join us together and assemble us in local congregations in order to both glorify himself and to help progressively conform us to the image of his Son.  Together we are in our natural state, separated from the body we become just like that ever mysterious lone shoe.