Much of our modern Christianity has emphasized individual salvation as what ultimately matters, seeing the Church as secondary and primarily as a tool for promoting and supporting our individual salvation. Yet Jesus and the writers of the NT seem to describe things the other way around: I don’t become a Christian and then decide to come into the Church for help with “my Christian life”; when I declare Jesus the Messiah, he saves me into the Church and begins to build the Church itself in and through my life.