Hard to speak for everyone. But I was an Evangelical and we professed the Nicene Creed. What we mean by that statement is the Universal Church, which is all Christians baptized in the Trinitarian formula.
The notes to the CF Statement of Faith say "The word "catholic" (literally, "complete," "universal," or "according to the whole") refers to the universal church of the Lord Jesus Christ and not necessarily or exclusively to any particular visible denomination, institution, or doctrine."
Of course it is interesting that the Latin Church uses a Greek composite as it's primary descriptor.
There are of course four notes of the Church.
- One
- Holy
- Catholic
- Apostolic
One is something that the Church is, which I think is where we struggle a little, because evidently that Church seems fractious and divided. I think we must work with the notion that the Church is both visible and invisible, and that despite our visible disunity, there is ultimately a spiritual unity, that embraces the universal nature of the Gospel and the people of God - the baptised.
Holy for most us us refers not to the presently attained perfection of the Church which as yet is indiscernible to most of us, but rather to the truth that we have been set apart for the purposes of God. The notion of the Church as Holy is not a question of who we are some much as whose we are. It is not the Pope's Church, it is not Billy Graham's Church, it is Christ's Church.
Catholic based on the contraction of two Greek words
kata and
'olos (holos) which means
according to the whole. The universality of the Church, which is not in dispute, is in reality already picked up in the first note of the Church. The idea of the Catholicity of the Church is a term born in the times of the post apostolic and pre conciliar times of the Church. It was the period during which the Church, despite much opposition and persecution, grew to the point where those who belonged represented perhap 8% of the Empire. It was a time when Christians focused on the things that bound them together, rather than the tings that tore them apart. Christians found their connections through the body of believers and their oversight by various sees, including Ephesus, Antioch, Jerusalem, Rome, and Alexandria, but who found their unity in Christ. However this sense of Catholicity referred not simply to geography, but also to time and traversed the dividing line of death to this world and holding us in one body stretching back to the Apostles, to station of life, to language/s spoken, and embraced a wealth of inherited traditions and cultures.
Apostolic from the Greek
apostolos meaning
sent refers the nature of the Church as the mission of the people of God sent into the world to proclaim the hope of the Gospel. As such Mission is not something that the Church does, but rather in ingrained into the nature of the Church and is something that the Church is. Sometimes we miss this point and I wonder sometimes when we are enthroning and installing people into various positions that Jesus seemed more interested in sending out laborers into the harvest.
Of course I speak not for everyone, however this is home I have come to understand these things.
