The question is not what is THE true church. The question is, what is A true church?

And so, what are the non-negotiable essentials that are found in A true or valid church without which you can't be a valid church?

Where I worship every Lord's Day, we often recite the nice scene creed as a congregation.

Does your church do that? If you've read the nice scene creed before, you'll remember that there's one line that can cause some confusion.

It states that the church is one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic. So how would Protestants to understand that? That the church is Catholic?

Hi, I'm Nathan W. Bingham, and you're listening to the Saturday edition of Renewing Your Mind.

Each Saturday, we were working our way through RC Sproul's Foundation series, and we're in the middle of a section on the church.

So what are the essential elements of a true church? And what does it really mean when we describe the church as Catholic and apostolic?

Well, here's Dr. Sproul to explain.

A few years ago, I had to embark on a lecture tour of Eastern Europe, which took us to Prague, and what is now the Czech Republic, to Budapest in Hungary, and then on by antiquated train from Budapest to Kluz-Napolka in Romania.

And when we crossed the border from Hungary into Romania, the train stopped, and there had to be a time for us to go through the customs check, and we had been warned that customs in Romania might be a very, very difficult procedure.

Well, two soldiers got on the train, and came to us and spoke to us in somewhat stenturian language, and pointed for us to take down our suitcases, and to open up everything.

And just as we were about to do it, their boss came in, who was a great, big, burly guard, and he came up and asked for our passports, and we gave them our passports, showed them that they were American passports.

There were four of us there, Vest and I, and our friends of ours, the Ingrams, and Mrs. Ingram was sitting there, and she had a brown paper bag with something sticking out the end of it, and the guard said, what's that?

And she opened the bag and displayed a Bible, and he said, in broken English, give me a book, and he took it, and started leafing through it, and he looked at us and said, you, he looked at me, and he said, you, no American.

And he looked at Mr. Ingram and said, you know American, and we know what in the world is going on, and he said, we weren't Americans, and I said, yes, look, we have our passports, he said, no, you know American, and he opened up, and he said, points to this pass, he says, read this.

And I read it, said, we are citizens of the commonwealth of heaven, and he said, see, I know Romanian, you know American, we are citizens of heaven, and he hugged us, and he said to the guys, these people are okay, they're Christians, let them go.

And here, in the province of God, we encountered a Christian customs guard on the border of Romania and Hungary.

Never forget that incident, because it communicated to us the flesh and blood reality of what is meant by the third characteristic of the church that we've looked at.

The church is one holy catholic, which means universal.

Again, in the apostles' creed, we say we believe in the communion of saints, forget this, this is the sins of resurrection of Bison, and we believe in the Catholic church.

We're not talking about the Roman Catholic church at that point, because in American religious jargon, the phrase or the term Roman Catholic has been shortened to simply Catholic, so that in many times when people refer to the Catholic church, they mean the Roman Catholic church.

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