- by Carrie Shaw
- on May 31, 2026
Western culture has changed dramatically, and the Christian landscape along with it. Just two generations ago, church attendance and Christian identity were a cultural norm. Today, weekly church attendance in Australia is estimated at roughly 4.6% to 7%. Compared to our grandparents’ generation, where 44% of Australians attended religious services at least monthly,* Australia is, well, just not that Christian anymore.
But the bigger shift may be cultural familiarity. Fifty or sixty years ago, many Australians grew up attending Sunday School, hearing Bible stories, and understanding basic Christian concepts. Even if they didn’t go on to become committed believers, the Christian framework was no particular mystery. Today, many people have almost no exposure to Christianity, and many are often biblically illiterate. The relevance or even reality of the story of Jesus is as foreign to many Australians as the far side of the moon.
This creates a very different evangelistic environment. Recognising this cultural and spiritual drift in the late 90s and early 2000s, many churches began asking, “how do we reach people who don’t even understand the language we’re speaking? How do we encourage people to step into church and feel welcome in a world where church and its message seem outdated, irrelevant or even harmful?” It’s out of this reality that the seeker-sensitive church model grew.
The Seeker-Sensitive Model
One answer to the growing unfamiliarity with Christian belief and practice was to emphasise the community and relational aspects of Christianity, to encourage people to feel part of something before they fully understood it. Many Christians rightly recognised that people often needed relationships and community before they could meaningfully engage with Christian belief.
And there is much to admire in this approach. In many ways, it mirrors the heart of Jesus’ ministry. He didn’t keep people at a distance. He welcomed questions, answered objections, and called all kinds of people to come and hear. And he modelled a certain way of being – we might call it ‘Christian’ – for all to see.
There was, however, a key difference between Jesus’ message and the “belong before believing” framework in many churches today. Jesus’ welcome was always an invitation into repentance, faith and discipleship. He didn’t redefine belonging to the people of God as mere proximity, interest, or participation. Belonging to God’s people then, as it had always been, was based on belief.
Repent And Believe The Good News
When Jesus began preaching about the Kingdom of God, he challenged many Jewish assumptions about what belonging to that kingdom** looked like. For many Jews, belonging to God’s people was deeply connected to their covenantal identity, Torah faithfulness, ancestry, and the hopes bound up in promises given to Israel.
These hopes were not wrong. Israel were the people to whom God had made promises. They were the nation He chose to be His witness to the world, and their belonging to Him was marked by covenant. And it was true that He had given them the Torah, laws intended to reveal His heart, His holiness, and His good way of living for human flourishing.
But God had chosen their patriarch Abraham long before the giving of the Torah. Abraham’s belonging, and the nation’s by extension, was marked first by faith in the promises of God, not by outward boundary markers alone. The Torah that came later was never meant to replace that kind of inward trust, but to give shape to a people whose hearts belonged to God (Gen 15:6, Rom 4:3, Gal 3:6–9).
By the time of Jesus, however, many people in Israel had come to treat visible markers of covenant identity as though they were the primary measure of belonging. Torah observance, purity practices, ancestry, and the traditions of the elders had become ways of deciding who was truly “in” and who was “out”. But the Torah was intended to lead the people to knowing God through the Messiah it anticipated. It showed both human failure and God’s faithfulness and, ultimately, that confidence couldn’t be placed in cultural or ancestral markers but only in faith in God’s promises.
A New Day In An Old Story
Why is any of this important? Because the Old Testament informs our understanding of the New Testament. The story of Jesus is not a new story, but a new day in an old story, the story of God’s people, God’s plan of reconciliation, and His invitation to belong.
God’s intention was always that all nations would be blessed through Abraham’s descendant, who is Jesus. Including the Gentiles in God’s family was never Plan B. It was always Plan A (Gen 12:3, Gal 3:16). Throughout the story, one theme appears again and again. The people who truly belonged to God weren’t merely those who shared Abraham’s bloodline but those who shared Abraham’s faith (Gal 3:29).
Belonging to God has always been an issue of the heart, a posture of faith in the promises of God. It’s connected to believing that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him (Heb 11:6). Without this kind of faith, the writer of Hebrews says that it’s impossible to please God.
And this was the core issue of Israel’s failure. Beneath Israel’s repeated sins lay a deeper problem: unbelief. But this isn’t just a problem that only one people group demonstrated. It’s a global human problem, one that began right back in the beginning in the Garden of Eden. It was disbelief – failure to trust God – that ruptured the relationship between God and humanity and brought sin into the world. It’s trust in God, through His provision of Jesus Christ, who is Lord and saviour, that restores that relationship.
If belonging to God’s people has always been rooted in faith, what does that mean for the church? Is the church simply a community that people participate in? Or is it something more?
The Church Is A Gathered People
The New Testament consistently presents the church not as a collection of people who happen to spend time together, but as a people gathered around a shared confession that Jesus is Lord.
The church is the community created by the gospel itself. It’s made up of those who have responded to God’s invitation through repentance and faith and who have been united to Christ.
This pattern appears throughout the book of Acts. The gospel is proclaimed, people respond in faith, they’re baptised, and they’re added to the community of believers. Following Peter’s sermon at Pentecost, those who received his message were baptised and added to their number. They then devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching, fellowship, the breaking of bread, and prayer (Acts 2:38–42). Belief wasn’t the result of belonging. Rather, belonging flowed from belief.
It’s worth noting just how central faith, or belief, is in the New Testament. In English Bibles, “faith” and “belief” sound like two different concepts, but in Greek they are closely related. Faith is the noun, believe is the verb. So to have “faith in Jesus” means actively believing, trusting, relying on, and giving allegiance to Jesus. Believing is not just agreeing with ideas in your head. It is trust in a person, in Christ, himself, and ultimately in God revealed through him.
People aren’t called merely to admire Jesus, associate with his followers, or participate in religious community. They’re called to believe (John 20:31, Rom 3:28, Gal 2:16). Believing (to have faith) isn’t an optional later development in Christian belonging, it’s the very means by which Christ is received and a person is brought into the family of God (Gal 3:26, John 1:12).
This isn’t to say that unbelievers were excluded from hearing the gospel or engaging with the Christian community. Quite the opposite. The early church was deeply evangelistic. The message of Christ was proclaimed publicly and invitations were extended widely.
But the New Testament still maintains a distinction between those who are responding to Christ and those who are not (1 Cor 5:12–13, Col 4:5). The church is never described simply as a community of interested participants. It is a community of disciples.
Belonging To The People Of God
The New Testament distinction matters because it shapes how we understand the church itself. If belonging is detached from belief, the church risks becoming little more than a social community with Christian influences.
But if belonging is grounded in faith, then the church remains what it has always been, a people called out by God, united to Christ, and gathered around the gospel (Matt 16:16-18, Rom 10:9-10). That shouldn’t make the church closed, cold, or suspicious of outsiders. It should make the church honest about what it is – a place where the gospel has been gladly received and a place where the gospel is joyfully lived out and witnessed to.
The gospel invitation is wide open, but Christian belonging isn’t created by proximity, participation, or shared community alone. It’s created by Christ himself, as people hear his word, trust his promises, repent, are baptised, and are joined to his people (Eph 2:19–22, 1 Pet 2:9–10).
Belonging is a beautiful word. The gospel offers it freely, and the church should extend that invitation generously. But in the church, belonging only truly makes sense and finds its meaning in Christ and in the confession that Jesus is Lord (Acts 2:38-41, Gal 3:26-28).
“So then you are no longer strangers and strangers, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God…” | Ephesians 2:19
