I know of a fascinating sculpture called Impossible Triangle in Perth, Australia. If you approach from the north, west, or east, you might wonder about its name. It looks nothing like a triangle. Instead it looks more like goalposts that have been savaged by a tornado, bars jut randomly here and there. I suppose it has some redeeming qualities—it’s shiny. But for the most part, it’s not beautiful.

Approach it from the south, however, and you will see something completely different. Eventually those bars seem to converge and form a perfect equilateral triangle—but not just any equilateral triangle. What you are looking at appears impossible. The sides are made of straight beams. At the three vertices of the triangle, the beams intersect at what are clearly 90-degree angles. Yet, any sophomore geometry student will tell you that the three angles of a triangle always total 180 degrees. There is no such thing as a triangle with three 90-degree angles.

Once you see it from the south, the title of the sculpture makes sense. The object is a three-dimensional impossibility. Beautiful. Perfect. But impossible. And yet, there it is. So you stand there and stare and say, “I can’t believe what I’m seeing!”

The church is similar. People talk as though there are two churches—visible churches and the invisible church. That is not accurate. The terms visible and invisible do not describe different churches. They describe different perspectives of the same church. But there is only one church. It looks different depending on the perspective from which you view it—man’s or God’s.

Approach the church from most directions, and it has some shiny parts. Church buildings may be attractive, the music pleasing. Most pastors are nice. But there is also plenty that looks wrong. In church you will find bickering, greed, and the most grotesque sins—even among the clergy.

But approach the church from God’s perspective, and you see something else entirely. What you are looking at is beautiful and orderly and perfect, impossibly so! When you look at the church from God’s perspective, you stand there and stare and say, “I can’t believe what I’m seeing!”

The problem is, we cannot see the church from God’s perspective, can we? That’s what we mean when we say the church is invisible. It’s a bit of a misnomer. The church is not really invisible; it is only invisible to us. That is why in our creeds we confess “I believe in the holy Christian church” but never “I see the holy Christian church.” We believe this perfect, majestic church exists, not because we have empirical evidence but simply because God promises us it exists.