BLOG 6.28.19. THE CHURCH: ILLUSION, DISILLUSION, THEN REALITY     

A lurking question about the church has to do with what standards do we use to evaluate a church, or to discern our likes and dislikes of a particular expression of the church. What makes a church a community of integrity? Somehow, we assume that all of those people who inhabit our churches, for whatever reason, have a clear vision of what its purpose is in God’s mission to inaugurate his new creation, … that it is somehow to be the community of God’s new humanity on display before the watching world.

But even that is a bit out of reach when dealing with the actual incarnations of that new humanity, what with the huge diversity of people that inhabit it, … but not surprising since few churches take pains to spell out what is the essence of the church, and what are the disciplines that create it in that essence, so that many come with expectations that are a bit unrealistic.

Face, it: here you have a company of people whose initial profession of faith is that they are sinners, unworthy of God’s grace, … who have done those they ought not to have done, and left undone those things that they should have done … “most miserable offenders.” Someone noted that it is more difficult to join the Boy Scouts than it is the church. Then you have all the diversity of healthy personalities all the way across the spectrum …to troubled and pathological personalities who have difficulty functioning even in families. You have those who join churches out of custom, or in need of some kind of community, but with no intention of having their lives radically transformed into God’s new creation people.

There is something of an algorithm that I find helpful in approaching this issue: illusion > dis-illusion>reality. We come to the church with our illusion of a wholesome spiritual community inhabited by exemplary persons, and that illusion may be fulfilled for a while, … but then something will occur, or some immature or insecure personality/personalities will emerge and bring tension and conflict. Or, some respected church leader will have a moral lapse and do something so disappointing that the whole community is shocked and disillusioned.

What we do at that point is to come to grips with the reality that the church is a community of folk in the process of being transformed out of their brokenness and all have the potential of behavior that is contradictory to God’s design. Ah! But that is when we need, desperately, to come to the purpose of the community/church to be that community of grace, of prayer, of mutual confession of our brokenness, and of love and forgiveness and reconciliation. The church may just become more of the church when it deals forthrightly and lovingly with the disillusioning episodes, whether in our house church/community groups, or in the larger congregations. We grow together in our quest to be the embodiment of Christ when we forsake our immature illusions about the church, and embrace our calling to be Christ to one another, … not condemning but ministering patiently for the restoration of the broken.

… And it doesn’t always turn out as “happily ever after.” But read your New Testament documents and you will see this algorithm being taught in multiple settings. To live with the illusion naively is to remain in immaturity as we confront the relentless disillusioning realities of incarnating God’s new humanity.

We’ll pursue this more in future blogs.