Faith comes by hearing the word of God and salvation is by grace through faith in Christ.
No denomination or religious system is needed for a personal encounter with the Living Jesus.
You can get saved in your living room while reading the Bible and praying.
The domestic Church is indeed important if it is in communion with the Catholic Church. If the Church Domestic is denying the Church Catholic, there is a problem in your home; find another.
I'd rather be where the Holy Scripture commands me to be.
II. To those who say, “I can have Jesus without the Church,” I say “no can do.” For the Church is the body of Christ and it pertains to the head of a living Body to be found with his body, not apart from it. That the Church is the Body of Christ is clear in many Scriptures such as
- Jesus is the head of the body the Church (Col 1:8)
- Now you are the body of Christ, each one of you is a part of it. (1 Cor 12:27)
- For just as we have many members in one body and all the members do not have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another. Since we have gifts that differ (Rom 12:4-6)
Hence, Christ the Head cannot be had or found apart from his Body the Church.
III. To those who say, “I can read my Bible alone,” it must be said that there would be no Bible if it were not for the Church. Jesus didn’t write a book. He founded a community he called “My Church” (Matt 16) and sent them to “Teach all that I have commanded” (Matt 28:20).
Of course it would be silly to have things depend solely on a book in the ancient world when almost no one could read, and even those who could, could scarcely afford books, which all had to be hand-copied prior to the invention of the printing press.
Further, the Bible is a Church book and is meant to be read in the context of Church life. Scripture itself warns: Our beloved brother Paul, according to the wisdom given him, wrote to you, as also in all his letters, speaking in them of these things, in which are some things hard to understand, which the untaught and unstable distort, as they do also the rest of the Scriptures, to their own destruction. (2 Peter 3:16). In effect Peter goes on to warn them to read Scripture in conformity with the Church.