Chucking the Church

            Lately I’ve been rethinking church. Not so much the one I go to but going to church at all. Perhaps it’s because someone asked me if I ever got tired of churchgoing and wanted to give it all up. I had to be honest; it was an honest question.

The answer? Yes. After all, the church is comprised of people, imperfect people. May I be blunt? Sometimes people annoy me. Now, before you smile in smug satisfaction, if you’re someone who sleeps in on Sunday morning, hear me out, because after I said yes, I also said some other things.

                Do you ever notice how when a person loves another that what is important to that person becomes important to the one in love? My husband thinks Woody Allen movies are the best. For years I thought they were mindless and repulsive at best, but I’ve grown to appreciate some (not all) of them. I enjoy flowers and wandering through garden shops. I also like reading labels in the grocery store and looking at new healthy food choices. Both of those place my husband in a catatonic state, but for my sake he’ll come along and do his best not to keel over in boredom. 

Similarly, because I love Jesus Christ, what matters to him matters to me. So to an even greater extent than movies, gardening, or food labels, the church matters to me because it’s vastly important to Jesus.  I know, I know, you may be able to join me in roasting a few congregations you’ve attended—the Church of Single Invisibility, where a wedding band makes you a real member; the Church of We’ve –Never-Done-It-That-Way-Before-and-Aren’t –Going-to-Start-Now, where your ideas have the same chance as a snowball  you know where; the Church of Sorry-Every-Area-of-Service-Is-Already-Taken, where there is no place to join in; or perhaps the Church of the Cold Shoulders, where you can come and go without a greeting from anyone. I’ve attended all of these churches.  

Still, I come back to my Love and what he loves, and I’m not giving up on the church. Regularly I remind myself that the church is imperfect.  Why do we expect anything more? No one on earth is perfect yet. So here we all are learning to be Christlike together. That’s not easy. Of course, we’re going to fail and annoy each other.  Jesus loved the church to death, and his plan is to present it to himself “a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless.”  (Ephesians 5:27, NIV)  Looks like that will still take a lot of washing and ironing!

So when I go to church, I endeavor to go with my eyes open—not  so much to the spots and wrinkles but to what God wants to do through his imperfect people. That the church works at all, grows at all, remains at all, is because of Christ’s commitment to his people and to demonstrating what he can do through the imperfect people of his church.