With church going in decline in the United States, what's the relevance of the church today?

And what's the significance of the Bible using the language of family to describe the church?

And what do we say to the person who insists that they can have a vibrant spiritual life but don't need the church?

We'll answer these questions and a whole lot more with our guest today, our colleague in Old Testament, Dr. Carmen Ims, from her new book, Becoming God's Family. I'm your host, Scott Ray. And I'm your co-host, Sean McDowell. This is Think Biblically from Talbot School of Theology, Biola University. Carmen, welcome. So good to have you with us as we talk about the final book in your trilogy of three on becoming God's family.

So it's obvious from reading your book that the church is really important to you, theologically and biblically, but also really personally too.

Help our listeners understand a little bit about why that is.

Sure. So I grew up in the church, and I don't ever remember a time when our family sat down on a Sunday morning to discuss whether we should go.

It was just obvious that we would go to church.

It was never a question.

Even when we went through really hard church situations, we went through an experience of a pastor failing, you know, falling into sin.

And the whole church ended up closing.

And that was a really tumultuous time for us.

But there was never even a consideration of walking away from the church.

It was just a question of where do we go next?

And I don't think I

really realized how important the church was until more recent years when I started watching

friends and family members to sort of lose interest and walk away. And I realized, we need to make a

case for why the church matters. It isn't obvious. And while I couldn't

see the forest for the trees because the church was so much a part of my life, the more time I've

spent reflecting on it, the more I've just been reinvigorated or recapivated by the church.

I feel like now that I'm looking for it,

now that I'm noticing it, every week I see stories of how God is at work in deep ways in

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