Have you ever agreed with a sign and then wished you hadn’t?
This weekend, just like any other weekend I’m home, I had College GameDay on. Near the end, during the picks segment, the camera settled on the panel, and behind them, above the crowd, four signs stood in a row.
Left to right, I copied them down word for word:
“Seek the living Jesus. Not ‘church,’ not religion, not politics”
“To all who suffer, don’t give up. Come to Jesus”
“Don’t give up. You are loved. Jesus says ‘come to me,’ not a ‘church’
“Forget religion. Get to Jesus”
My first reaction was a nod. The living Jesus over dead religion? Hope for people who are hurting? I believe every word of that. I’ve also seen where those signs come from.
I worked in church relations for an evangelistic ministry, which meant seeing a lot of churches from the back hallway, and I know how fast a mission turns into machinery. And I’ve been a pastor. I know the pull to care more about Sunday running smoothly than about who wasn’t in the room.
I’ve been the “church” on that sign.
Then I read the signs again.
Somebody had put the word church in quotation marks, on two different signs.
The segment moved on, and I couldn’t shake the question: what exactly were they telling people to skip?
What the signs get right
The people holding those signs deserve some credit first. They got up early, stood in a packed crowd, and spent their one shot at national television on Jesus. Most of us have never done that.
They’re also right about more than you might expect.
“Come to me” is a direct quote. Jesus said it in Matthew 11:28: “Come to me, all of you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” The weary he had in mind were, first of all, people worn out by religion. Twelve chapters later he describes the religious leaders of his day: “They tie up heavy loads that are hard to carry and put them on people’s shoulders, but they themselves aren’t willing to lift a finger to move them” (Matt 23:4). Jesus had very little patience for religion that crushes people. Neither should we.
The line about politics has good company too. In 1933, Dietrich Bonhoeffer warned that nothing would be more destructive to the German church than letting party politics use it.1 He was right. Twelve years later, the Nazis hanged him.
And the second sign, the one for people who suffer? I have no notes. That sign is Matthew 11:28 on poster board.
So why couldn’t I shake the other three?
The “church” on the sign
Maybe because most of us know exactly which “church” those signs mean.
You’ve been let down by an institution. A school that cared more about its rankings than its students. A company that called itself a family right up until the layoffs.
Some of you were let down by a church. The pastor who fell. The leaders who protected the institution instead of the person it hurt. The small group that went quiet when your marriage came apart. If that’s you, I won’t argue you out of your scars.
Ready for one that may step on your toes a little bit more?
Some of us agree with those signs for reasons that have nothing to do with being hurt. Church is just inconvenient. Saturday is for football, and Sunday is for recovering from Saturday. A podcast on the drive to work feels like plenty of Jesus. Nobody burned us. We drifted, and a sign that says Jesus never wanted us there anyway sounds a lot like permission.
Underneath all four signs is a longing I share: people want Jesus without the damage. Underneath the longing sits an assumption, and the quotation marks give it away. On those signs, “church” stands in the same row as religion and politics. It’s a human system, built by people, that you can opt out of, like canceling a subscription.
If that’s what the church is, the signs are right. Skip it.
That leaves the question the signs never ask. What is the church, according to the Jesus they’re quoting? And can you have him without it?
I work through questions like this with a method I call Redemptive Correlation. You listen to the culture’s question on its own terms, distill the longing underneath it, reframe it through Scripture’s whole story (creation, fall, redemption, restoration), and respond with something you can actually live. We’ve listened. We’ve named the longing. Now let’s go to the one man in the New Testament who got exactly what those signs promise.
“Why are you persecuting me?”
Saul of Tarsus met the living Jesus with no church involved: no pastor, no building, no worship band. Jesus came to him directly, on a road, in the middle of the day. If anybody in history had grounds to hold up a “Jesus, not church” sign, it was Saul.
Luke tells us what Saul had been doing before the road: “Saul, however, was ravaging the church. He would enter house after house, drag off men and women, and put them in prison” (Acts 8:3). Then he asked the high priest for letters to the synagogues in Damascus, roughly 135 miles north, so that he could do the same thing there (9:1–2). Saul was traveling with arrest warrants.
Then the light. Saul hits the ground and hears a voice: “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting my followers?”
Except that’s the wrong quote. Read it again: “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” (9:4). Saul asks who’s speaking, and the answer comes back: “I am Jesus, the one you are persecuting” (9:5).
Saul had never laid a hand on Jesus. He had laid hands on Jesus’s people, house after house. Jesus took every one of those arrests personally.
Augustine, preaching four centuries later, explained it with a crowd: “It may happen that someone’s foot is trodden on in a crowd, and it hurts: the tongue cries out, ‘You’re treading on me!’ It does not say, ‘You are treading on my foot.’”2 Head and body speak as one. Anybody who has stood in a GameDay crowd knows exactly what he means.
That’s the first problem with the signs. They offer a Jesus you can have apart from his people. The living Jesus, the one the first sign tells us to seek, looks at his people and calls them “me.”
“Brother Saul”
If the story stopped at verse 5, the signs might still have a case. Saul met Jesus alone. Done.
Watch what Jesus does next: “But get up and go into the city, and you will be told what you must do” (9:6).
Jesus had Saul’s full attention. He could have finished the conversation right there on the road. He sends him into town instead, blind, to sit for three days and wait for somebody else to tell him what to do.
That somebody is the last person Saul expected. Ananias is a disciple in Damascus, exactly the kind of person Saul came to arrest (9:14). His name might as well have been on the list. When the Lord tells him to find Saul, Ananias does what any of us would do. He objects: “Lord, I have heard from many people about this man, how much harm he has done to your saints in Jerusalem” (9:13).
Translation: Lord, have you read this guy’s file?
He goes anyway. He walks into the house, puts his hands on the man who came to arrest him, and says two words that carry the whole story: “Brother Saul” (9:17).
The scales fall. Saul is baptized. Then, Luke says, “Saul was with the disciples in Damascus for some time” (9:19). Later, when he tries to join the disciples in Jerusalem, and they’re too afraid of him to believe he’s really a disciple, Barnabas puts his own name on the line and vouches for him (9:26–27).
Even Karl Barth, the theologian most famous for calling religion unbelief, saw it. On the road, Saul deals with Jesus alone. In the second act, the community enters through Ananias, and Jesus’s closing words on the road had already promised it a part in Saul’s future.3
One precision note for careful readers. Paul insists he received his gospel by revelation from Jesus, from no human teacher (Gal 1:11–12). Ananias didn’t hand Saul his message. Jesus handed Saul to his people.
So here’s the line I can’t get past:
Jesus will meet you alone. He won’t leave you alone.
“Without spot or wrinkle”
You may be thinking, “That’s a nice Bible story, Jacob. You haven’t met my church.”
Fair. Paul hadn’t either. But he knew what churches were like. He spent most of his letters correcting them. And he still wrote this: “Christ loved the church and gave himself for her to make her holy, cleansing her with the washing of water by the word. He did this to present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or anything like that, but holy and blameless” (Eph 5:25–27).
Read that slowly. If Christ is still cleansing her, she still needs cleaning. Paul describes a groom who is still washing a bride who still has stains. He loves her too much to leave her that way, and he has already loved her enough to die for her.
That’s the whole story of Scripture in one marriage.
In creation, God looked at a man by himself and said, “It is not good for the man to be alone” (Gen 2:18).
In the fall, everything broke, religion included. The heavy loads of Matthew 23 are real, and so are the churches that tied them on people. The signs see this part clearly.
In redemption, “Christ loved the church and gave himself for her” (Eph 5:25). He died for a people.
In restoration, the story ends at a wedding: “the marriage of the Lamb has come, and his bride has prepared herself” (Rev 19:7).
Here’s where the signs’ foundation cracks. They define the church by the fall, by its failures, and then reason correctly from a wrong definition. Scripture defines the church by what Christ has done for her and what he will make of her. The signs ask you to choose between the groom and the bride. The groom has already made his choice.
If you’re in a church
Those quotation marks are partly our fault. People put “church” in quotes because of what they’ve seen us do, and what they’ve watched us fail to do.
So here’s one thing to try this week. Be an Ananias.
Think of the person whose name you’d rather not see on the list. The one who left. The one who got hurt in your church, or by it. The one who is honestly a little scary to you, the way Saul was to Ananias. Text them. Buy the coffee. Sit with them. Say “brother” or “sister” and mean it.
And if you agreed with the signs because Sunday is inconvenient, I’ll say it as gently as I can: you don’t get to call that freedom. My own confession puts it plainly. All believers are “bound to join themselves to particular churches, when and where they have opportunity so to do” (Second London Baptist Confession 26.12). Jesus sent Saul into the city. He’s sending you too.
If the signs were written for you
If you’re suffering, if a church hurt you, if you’ve about given up on the whole thing, hear the second sign again. It was right. Don’t give up. Come to Jesus.
He’ll meet you. He met Saul on a road, and he can meet you on a couch on a Saturday morning.
Just know what he does with the people he meets alone. He hands them to his people. Probably someone you’re nervous about. Probably someone nervous about you.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer knew the church at its worst. He watched most of the German church make its peace with Hitler. He stayed anyway, helped lead the church that resisted, and wrote this: “Those who love their dream of a Christian community more than the Christian community itself become destroyers of that Christian community even though their personal intentions may be ever so honest, earnest, and sacrificial.”4
You don’t have to go back to the church that hurt you. You may need to go somewhere else. But when Jesus sends you an Ananias, let him in the house.
Jesus will meet you alone. He won’t leave you alone.
The crowd
Imagine if the next person who gave up on “church” walked into a living room and got called “brother” before anyone asked about his past.
Imagine a church known in its town for the people it sits with, the ones who suffer, the ones who left, the ones whose names used to be on somebody’s list.
Imagine if the folks watching GameDay at home on a Saturday morning, the ones the signs were written for, knew exactly where to find a Christian who would show up with coffee and stay.
The signs wouldn’t need quotation marks.
This morning the segment ended, the show cut to the first game of the day, and the four signs dropped out of frame. I haven’t stopped thinking about the people holding them. Whoever they are, they got up early and stood shoulder to shoulder with thousands of strangers to tell the rest of us to come to Jesus alone. I know now what they were telling people to skip. It’s the place Jesus sends everyone he meets.
Even the sign telling you to skip the crowd had to be held up in one.
Ryan Currie, “Christ Existing as Church-Community: Bonhoeffer’s Ecclesiology and Religionless Christianity,” Themelios 50, no. 1 (2025): 138.
Augustine, Exposition 2 of Psalm 30, 3, in Expositions of the Psalms 1–32, trans. Maria Boulding, The Works of Saint Augustine III/15 (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2000), 323.
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/3.1, ed. G. W. Bromiley and T. F. Torrance (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1961), 165.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, reader’s ed., trans. Daniel W. Bloesch (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2015), 10.