All of you who either follow my blog or read it through Facebook (or encounter me on the street for that matter) will have some idea of my frustrations with the church. This is not specifically with the congregation in which I worship corporately, but with the global Christian church. Without specifically going into my "beefs" with the Body (of which I am a part, just know that I don't think we are honoring God with our functions, resources, worship or envageliistic efforts by doing them in manner He has asked us to. I also believe that this is all very much our own doing. This statement also warrants more explanation than I intend to give right now, but maybe I can give it another post on a another day.
In all my passion and offense at the adultery and no forth of the church, I've wavered back forth on one very tough issue: where do I direct my frustrations. This is not merely an issue of who to talk to; I often wonder who to be mad at. An older (than us) youth pastor told me to be mad at the enemy. As I pondered this, I felt like it was giving Satan and demons to much credit and not holding Christians accountable for their actions and attitudes. But after reading one author's expounding on the title quote, the Spirit led me to understand why I should direct my frustration at the enemy.
To paraphrase Augustine, while the church has been a whore, she is still my mother. I can't leave her any more than I could my own mother. - Adam McLane from his article Open-Source Theology for Immerse Journal
If you were to spend any amount of time ministering to prostitutes, sex slaves or rape victims (or the many who have been all three) you would soon find yourself quite angry at the men responsible for making those women (and men) believe lies that led them to, forced them into or kept them in their appalling situation. You would see that, while their situation is horrid, the prostitute or victim has the kind of soul that Jesus died to save. Your disgust for the evil and deception that got her(him) there would ingite a compassion and passion to remove them from the burdens of their situation.
Likewise, who should we get angry at when we see the Body (and individual members of it) hurting itself? The father of lies. In a losing battle with the everlasting Father, Satan's best offensive is to seduce His Bride and mislead His children.
While I know all to well how difficult it is to keep this big picture in mind when confronted with the frequent "missing the mark" of the local church and conflicts with individual members of the Body, it is all very important to remember. Even when we witness the body injuring itself, we are to act as we would to the promisicuous sex-slave as we fight to free her. Our passion for the the church should never pit us against her. It should always spur us to humble obedience of the simple (and yet obviously very difficult) demands for the church in the Word. I would like to reiterate that we must (pick up our crosses and) follow Jesus, not the ideas of what the church should look like that men have conjured.
I repent of unhealthy attitudes I have portrayed before you all and my Saviour. It's hard for me to know any other way than to tell everyone to stop everything they're doing and start over (something I've had to do myself over and over btw). I'll finish with this, Bonhoeffer's words from his biography by Eric Mataxas:
Here I meet people as they are, far from the masquerade of "the Christian world", people with passions, criminal types, small people with small aims, small wages and small sins—all in all they are people who feel homeless in both senses, and who begin to thaw when one speaks to them with kindness—real people; I can only say that I have gained the impression that it is just these people who are much more under grace than under wrath, and that it is the Christian world that is more under wrath than grace.
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