Why did the church develop?

I have been asked when and how but I do not believe I have ever been asked “why” it was developed.  Your question leads to two answers depending on what you meant by the way you phrased your question. 

The Church was established on Pentecost as described in Acts chapter 2.  Jesus developed it during his lifetime but it was planed from before the world began.  It was necessary to restore our relationship to God that died when Adam and Eve disobeyed God and ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  The Church has continued from that day to this unchanged by Man.  I say unchanged because to change it is to leave it.  (Galatians 1:6-8)  Unfortunately, as Paul is saying in his letter to the Galatians, even though the Church was established Man began to leave the gospel they had been given.  Some wanted to keep Jewish traditions.  Some refused to accept the resurrection.  By 90 A.D. when the Book of Revelation was written whole congregations were in danger of leaving the faith.

The same arrogance that Man demonstrated in the Garden of Eden that they knew better than God has always gotten in the way.  That is why in Mathew 7 he says that just calling on the name of the Lord won’t get it.  Then in the same chapter he says that few would find the correct path to heaven.  God wants everyone to be saved by recognizes that some just do not love the truth enough.

Then comes the other way of answering your question.  If by Church you mean denominationalism then you have to deal with all the religions that claim to be the Church.  The first to leave the Church were the Catholics.  The problem with Man changing the rules to suit himself is that if one can do it then it can be done again.  The Roman Catholic Church split and then you have the Greek Orthodox in established in 1054 A.D.  They split over a power struggle over where the headquarters would be located.

Then different groups formed in Europe when other men failed to find the Catholic Church in the Bible.  The Lutherans formed in 1517A.D., the Episcopalians formed in 1533 and the Presbyterian formed in 1550A.D.  Then with the colonization of the Americas you have the formation of the Mormons in 1830, the Jehovah Witness in 1879, the Adventist in 1831 and all the flavors of the Pentecostals that started rather late in 1900 A.D.  All these different groups and yet they still refused to return to the Church that Christ established. 

When the Ohio valley was being colonized there was finally a group that began to understand and they preached that all the answers to how God wanted to be worshiped and what the plan was for God to save mankind were all in the Bible.  They understood that the scriptures were the answer.  They understood that the only way to worship God was to worship as they did in the first century and to speak where the Bible speaks and remain silent where the Bible is silent.  People call it the restoration movement.  The idea was that they were restoring the Church of Christ.  Who can tell, others have thought the servants of God were wiped out only to have God reveal servants by the thousands.  In any case, it is the same one in the same way that if you plant a tomato seed you get a tomato and not corn.  It is the same one in the same way that if you take a rulebook for baseball and follow it you play baseball and not tennis.  The Bible is the rulebook and the Church of Christ is the same Church that was established on Pentecost.