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Spiritual but Not Religious? Why You Can’t Know God Alone

Spiritual but Not Religious? Why You Can’t Know God Alone

Last updated on: October 1, 2026 at 10:18 am by Mike P. Taylor

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Spiritual but Not Religious? Why You Can’t Know God Alone 2026-10-01T10:18:48-05:00 Mike P. Taylor

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You can’t fully know God without Church

A lot of people say, “I’m spiritual, but I’m not religious.” Which usually means they don’t go to church.

But what if by not participating in the Church, your view of God is incomplete? What if you can’t fully know God outside of participation in his community?

And what if, as a result, what you believe to be true about God is only a portion of the full picture?

We like to think that what we currently know is all there is to be known. At least, until we learn something new.

Then, once we realize that we weren’t 100% right, we think that by adding what we knew before to what we now know, we can now be 100% right again.

But we’re always missing at least some portion of truth. Think back to the things you believed to be true a decade ago. You only had part of the picture. (And it’s still true today.)

So how could we think that we alone could see the full picture of God?

Paul, talking about the resurrection, says, “Now I know in part; then I shall know fully…” (1 Corinthians 13:12) So let’s start with this fundamental realization…

What we believe to be true about God is only a portion of the picture of who God really is in all his fullness.

In fact, it’s impossible to fully know God strictly from your own personal perspective. He’s too big for any one person to understand.

Paul said that the Church makes up the fullness of Christ. (Ephesians 1:22-23)

Ephesians 3:10 says, “…through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known.”

In other words…

God (and Christ) is fully known only through the Church collectively. Different parts of the body of Christ come together to create a whole picture.

You can’t know God fully outside of community in God’s Church.

The Apostle Paul talks in Ephesians 3 about how God’s purpose is to use the variety of believers within the body of Christ to showcase God’s glory to the world.

He calls it the “manifold wisdom of God” which means “many diverse manifestations.”

In Ephesians 2, Paul also talks about how believers are like stones being built together on the cornerstone of Jesus into a dwelling place for God.

Each of us fits together to create the environment where God is fully known.

Here’s another way to put it:

Our view and knowledge of God is limited by our unity within the Body of Christ.

In Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, he’s talking to a diverse group of Christians in a large, thriving city. The church was brand new and there were many types of people with many different types of beliefs.

And here’s what he says to them in Ephesians 3:17-19:

He prays that they would be rooted and established in love, which can only exist in community.

Then he prays that they would have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge.

This, he says, will lead them to being filled with the fullness of God.

Notice the order.

Notice that the fullness of God, the full knowledge of him that goes beyond what we can personally understand, is only experienced together with all the Lord’s people, rooted in love for one another.

Jesus was once asked what’s the greatest commandment in God’s Law. He said that the first and greatest commandment is to love God. But then he says something interesting…

He says that there’s a second commandment that is ***“***like the first”, and that is to love your neighbor as yourself. (Matthew 22:37-40)

The phrase Jesus used when he said that the second commandment “is like” the first commandment is a word in Greek that means the same as or of equal rank.

When you put Paul’s teaching in the context of what Jesus taught about loving others, the picture becomes much clearer:

The only way we truly come to know God in all his fullness is within the context of community with other believers.

In isolation, your view of God, and mine, is always slightly incomplete. There’s a portion of God’s character that you can only experience through other believers.

Of course, the friction of someone else’s view of God rubbing against our view of God is really uncomfortable.

But unity drives God’s blessings, according to Psalm 133, and unity is how the world comes to know Jesus, according to John 17.

So when alternate viewpoints frustrate you, when you run into the desire to avoid other believers, remember that we literally need each other to see the full picture of God.

And without the other, we’ll all ultimately miss out.

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About Mike P. Taylor

Mike helps people wrestle with the toughest questions of faith. He's the author of the book Grounded Faith for Practical People and he writes at mikeptaylor.com where he helps people rethink religion for a new generation. You can read more about the author here.

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