Today, we are going to scale up from the level of the individual disciple and talk about the church as a whole. And the topic we are going to deal with is the proper relationship between the church and the state laid out in Article 23.

To do that properly we are going to look first at the definition of a state. I will define state as the “governing authority of a territorial nation”. Couple things to note there. The state is a sovereign nation defined by a geographic area. So there is a ruling authority within a given territory. So a place with a ruling authority is a “state”.

Let’s look for a second at the definition of “church”. Church is a “community of Jesus disciples who are called out of this world, to give their higher allegiance to the exaltation and mission of Jesus Christ”. These are my words just to get us oriented. Let’s look at how Article 23 defines “church”.