Church Gone Wrong

There is nothing like the church on earth. God’s church is a collection of ordinary people who have nothing in common except their love for Jesus but who call each other brothers and sisters and would risk their lives for each other. Jews and Gentiles, black and white, rich and poor, educated and uneducated, extrovert and introvert, experience a miraculous equality that is, nevertheless, not a bland sameness: “All for one, and one for all.”

Belonging to sinners. But here is the rub: the church is a community of sinners in process of being saved. When people join a church, they have what Dietrich Bonhoeffer once called a “wish-dream” (p. 26) of the perfect community. Some spend a lifetime looking for the perfect church. Not finding it, some try to start their own. The reason is very deep: they are not prepared to commit themselves to sinners. So, like Judas, they make only a partial commitment to the people of God as they find it. As an astute African once said, like Judas they find their identity in rebellion against their brothers and sisters. God hates such visionary dreaming. God wants us to love real people, not ideal people, just as God does. There is a profound spiritual issue involved in this. If we refuse to associate with sinners, we are implicitly forgetting that Jesus has associated with us.

Belonging to sinners covenantally. There must be something like “for better or for worse” involved. When trouble comes, when a leader fails, when there is a budget crunch, when there is fighting, it is tempting to leave and find another church where we can experience, at least for a few months, a religious equivalent of infatuation. Some people move from one church infatuation to another because they are in love with the idea of being spiritually stimulated. They want romance rather than covenant marriage, but by running on a romantic high, they short-circuit spiritual growth and have only superficial relationships. Almost all of the exhortations in the New Testament (such as “be filled with the Holy Spirit”; Ephes. 5:18) and most of the promises of the New Testament (such as the fruit of the Spirit; Galatians 5:22–23) are community messages. They come through belonging, not flirting. So joining the church is a covenant issue.

R. Paul Stevens, “Membership, Church,” in The Complete Book of Everyday Christianity: An A to Z Guide to Following Christ in Every Aspect of Life (InterVarsity Press, 1997), 621.