“Be appalled, O heavens at this;/ be shocked, be utterly desolate,/ declares the LORD,/ for my people have committed two evils:/ they have forsaken me,/ the fountain of living waters,/ and hewed out cisterns for themselves,/ broken cisterns that can hold no water.” – Prophet Jeremiah speaking for God
“We need to draw ever nearer to the reality of Christian faith and witness in our time, however burdensome, however heavy with failure, limitation, and disappointment. The reason is simple. Our Lord Jesus Christ comes to us in the flesh. We can draw near to him only in his body, the church. Loyalty to him requires us to dwell within the ruins of the church.” – Reno
“At home in my own house there is no warmth or vigor in me, but in the church when the multitude is gathered together, a fire is kindled in my heart and it breaks its way through.” – Martin Luther
“The church is the mirror that reflects the whole effulgence of the divine character. It is the grand scene in which the perfections of Jehovah are displayed in the universe.” – Charles Bridges
“…so that through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places.” – Paul to the Ephesians
In my experience nothing is so simultaneously grating and jolting as being an interested church member. I mean, that’s hard! If it’s not hard, and you’re not feeling the force of the admonitions to longsuffering and “bearing with one another,” you need to move further into the heart of the church. It’s there, in that furnace of annoyances and pettiness and small hypocrisies and inefficiency that God does His great refining work.
Being an interested church member is hard, but sometimes in that arduousness you will come upon great joys. Those joys, however, aren’t discovered at the peripheries. Enter the church and search the middle, inconvenient halls, inside the rooms marked “Striving side by side” and “Love endures all things.”
Just like you, I’ve heard the thin, cynical voices that expose all structures and institutions as necessarily corrupt. I too have chafed under the inefficiencies of volunteer labor and paltry funding. I’ve smelled the hypocrisy, so rank and powerful as to be coming from….uh-oh! I’ve seen the problem, and I’ve been the problem.
But don’t cave in, either to rosy-hued sentimentality or despairing cynicism. You don’t have to consistently discover pleasant things in your church. Instead, study her Leader! Shouldn’t the only fact that regulates our attitude toward church - our church - be, “Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her”?
One Comment
Amen, well said and I will soon be an active member!
Post a Comment