It is just the church...

One of the things I have come to realize over the years is that even though I have given my adult life to the church - and love it dearly - it is only church.  Too often, I think, some fail to realize that the church isn't Jesus.  Oh, we have love to share and we're called to minister as the Body of Christ.  But we aren't Jesus...

... mostly we are broken women and men doing the best we can.  And sometimes we are able to share love in healing and redemptive ways.  That is always a beautiful thing for the Lord.  But more often than not we're also bogged down with fear and sin and our wounds get the best of us, right?  Pastor M. Craig Barnes has written this note to pastors:

A pastor's ability to enjoy church is directly related to knowing its limits. The church is not Jesus. It may be the body of Christ, but only sort of.  The Reformers always maintained an important distinction between the visible body - which is weak - and the invisible Body of Christ - which transcends the limitations of the church we see.  This frees the pastor not to take the church more seriously than God does... Clearly God doesn't expect the church to build the New Kingdom on earth. That will always be accomplished by the ongoing work of the now ascended Christ working with the Holy Spirit.... So when pastors are trying to evaluate the success of their life's work, they dare not allow the limited and weak body known as church to be their measure. (p. 12, The Pastor as Minor Poet)

I suspect those who are not pastors could benefit from such a humble and liberating notion of the church, too.  Sometimes the criticism of a church - or THE church - that I hear is more a projection of an individual's own failings writ large.  Other times their critique is born of real naivete. To be sure, churches hurt real people in very real ways - but that must be said for all of us (myself included) if we're at all honest.  So I'm often perplexed - and frustrated - when people choose to forget this reality.   

In The Great Speckled Bird, Rob McCall writes that the current arguments against religion offered by the likes of Dawkins, Hitchens et al are simply true for all people.  When the NY Times summarizes Dawkins' book, The God Delusion, like this:  "An Oxford scientist asserts that belief in God is irrational and that religion has done great harm to the world," McCall writes:  "Who could argue with this?  But of course, the same assertions could be made about science and technology which gave us weapons of mass destruction, the collapse of world fisheries and global climate change among other things.  The same assertions could, in fact, be made about the entire human race:  that they are irrational and that they have done a great deal of harm to the world." (p. 130)

He continues: 

Yes, horrible things have been done by those who marched over the broken, bleeding bodies of others under the flag of religion: the Crusades, the Conquistadores, the Inquisition, mass persecutions of the Jews, the Salem witch trials. But horrible things have also been done by those who marched over the bleeding bodies of others under the flag of anti-religion: the Reign of Terror in France, the Nazi holocaust, Stalin's starvations, Mao's revolution, Pol Pot's killing field. It is neither flag of Faith nor the flag of Reason that is horrible; it is marching over the broken, bleeding bodies of others under any flag or no flag at all that is horrible. (p. 131)

So the Apostle Paul got it right when he told us that we all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God - everyone of us.  None are a whole lot more holy or noble or sanctified than anybody else - and that includes the faithful, the reasonable, the churched and the unchurched, those who have been blessed by congregations and those who have been wounded and those who have done the wounding inside the church. 

Because, you see, it is just the church - and the church is not Jesus.  This distinction has become helpful to me over the years and could be helpful to those who aren't clergy, too.  What do you think?