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She had attended three different churches in two years. The first had great music. The second had a dynamic speaker. The third felt warm the moment she walked through the door. But sitting in her car after that third Sunday service, she called her sister and said something that stopped the conversation cold: “I still don’t know if any of these places are actually a church.”
She wasn’t being cynical. She was asking a serious question — one that more people are asking out loud right now than at any point in a generation.
With thousands of churches closing their doors and millions of believers quietly stepping away, the question of what a church actually is has never been more urgent. The answer isn’t found in the lighting, the worship style, the Sunday morning headcount, or the community outreach calendar. The answer is found in 1 Corinthians 6:9–11.
The Question Nobody Wants to Ask Out Loud
There is no shortage of churches. Drive through any town in America and you will pass a dozen before you reach the highway — big ones and small ones, traditional and contemporary, ones that emphasize music and ones that have quietly replaced doctrine with inspiration.
That many options should bring comfort. Instead, for a lot of people, it brings confusion. And confusion, Scripture makes clear, is no accident.
Paul wrote to a local church in Corinth that was struggling — not with a shortage of religion, but with an excess of the wrong kind. They had pride, division, lawsuits between members, and patterns of sin that looked more like the surrounding city than the God they claimed to serve. Into that mess, the Holy Spirit asks a question that cuts through all of it:
Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? — 1 Corinthians 6:9
It is a rhetorical question, but Paul means it as a declaration: the kingdom of God is not populated by the unrighteous. And if a local church is going to be a legitimate reflection of that kingdom, it cannot look like the world it was called out of.
The standard does not begin with programs or personalities. It begins with people — specifically, with what has happened to them.
Grace Didn’t Just Forgive You — It Repositioned You
To understand what makes a church legitimate, you first have to understand what happened to the people inside it.
Paul’s list in verses 9 and 10 would feel at home in any news cycle today — fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, thieves, drunkards, extortioners. These are not relics of an ancient culture. These are the very behaviors the world now celebrates as identity and liberation. Paul’s point is not that the church should be shocked by them. Sinful people sin. That is simply what they do.
For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God. — Romans 3:23
The unregenerate soul has no option but to live after the flesh. It is their nature. A dog barks because it is a dog. A lost man sins because it is the only nature he has — until something changes.
And something changes in verse 11.
And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God. — 1 Corinthians 6:11
Feel the weight of that past tense: such were some of you. Not are. Were. Paul points backward to a life that no longer defines these people. Something happened. Someone intervened. And the result was not merely a cleared record — it was a complete change of position before God.
Washed — God dealt with their status. The filth and stain of sin that made them unclean before a holy God was not covered over. It was removed. The blood of Christ does not mask the problem; it eliminates it.
Sanctified — God set them apart. Before salvation, they were indistinguishable from the world around them, carried by its currents without resistance. Now they are called out. They belong to God. They are different — not by effort, but by grace.
Justified — God declared them righteous. The relationship that was once defined by enmity and death is now defined by peace and life. They can approach God. They can hear from God. They can live for God.
This is not a minor adjustment to someone’s moral record. This is a complete repositioning. Grace is not a pardon handed down by a distant judge. It is an adoption into a family, a cleansing by a Father, a declaration by the only One whose verdict holds for eternity.
And that repositioning is the very foundation of the local church.
“Such Were Some of You” — The Only Membership Requirement That Matters
When the Holy Spirit moved Paul to write these words, the local church was brand new. There were only a handful of them in the entire world. No one was confused about what a church was, because the definition was clear: a church was a body of people called out of the world through faith in the finished work of Christ, gathered around His cause and His commission.
What set them apart from every other gathering on earth was not their building, their order of service, or their tradition. It was their new position in Christ.
And such were some of you.
Those five words carry the full weight of what a legitimate church is. A true local church is not a collection of moral people working to be better versions of themselves. It is not a community organization with spiritual overtones. It is a body of men and women who were once exactly like the world around them — and who were then washed, sanctified, and justified — and who now live in the power of that new reality.
The implications reach further than most people realize. A church’s legitimacy is not determined by its size, its budget, its style, or its community presence. It is determined by the spiritual condition of its people. Are they born again? Have they genuinely encountered the grace of God? Do they understand that they are no longer who they once were?
That is God’s standard. And it is a standard no program can manufacture and no personality can substitute for.
This does not mean a legitimate church is a perfect church. Corinth was anything but perfect — and yet Paul still addressed them as saints, as the called-out ones, as people who had been washed and sanctified and justified. A true church is a gathering of imperfect people who know exactly what they were, who know exactly what Christ did, and who are pressing forward in the power of what they have now become.
What This Means for You
If you are searching for a church — or quietly questioning whether the one you attend is the real thing — the answer is not found in the worship style, the preaching personality, or the building. The question to ask is far simpler: Is this a congregation of people who understand that they are sinners saved by grace, washed clean, set apart, and declared righteous before God through the finished work of Jesus Christ?
If the gospel is preached without apology, if the cross is central, if the people gathered there know what they were and give God the glory for what they are — you have found a legitimate local church. Not a perfect one. But a real one.
And if you have never personally experienced that washing, that sanctifying, that justifying work of God — today is the day to receive it. Christ has already done everything required. He died, He was buried, and He rose again — not to make bad people into good people, but to make dead people alive. All that remains is for you to place your faith in what He has already accomplished.
The grace that built the church is the same grace extended to you right now.
If you want to explore what it looks like to walk in that grace through life’s hardest seasons, Standing in the Dark was written for exactly that.
This post is part of the series Blueprint for a New Testament Church, a verse-by-verse study through 1 Corinthians.
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