Churches aren’t perfect. If you haven’t worked that out yet, then stick around church long enough and you will. Churches are only as perfect as the repentant sinners that Jesus uses to build them. And let you down they certainly will.
Don’t get me wrong. As a church leader, I’m anything but complacent about this. God saves people with messy lives and then starts ironing out the wrinkles and removing the mucky stains. He didn’t just send his Son to die and rise again to free us from the hellish penalty of sin, but also to deliver us from the enduring power of sin. He did it, in the words of Ephesians 5:26-27, “to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the Word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless.”
In the meantime, if you have been disappointed by people in your church, or if you know your actions have made you a disappointment to others, then I want to encourage you with a few words. Whatever your own experience of the Church-God’s work in progress-I hope it helps you to see it with the same eyes as the apostle Paul.
1 Corinthians 1:4“I always thank God for you because of his grace given you in Christ Jesus.”
Two of my friends are former church leaders who have stepped out of ministry and turned their backs on the Church. If you heard their stories, you probably wouldn’t blame them. They saw church life at its worst and the disappointment crushed their spirits. Someone once said, “To dwell above with saints we love, well that will be such glory; but to dwell below with saints we know, now that’s a different story!” If you have ever found hurt instead of healing as part of a local church, then you will know that it takes more than a sense of humour to survive.
That’s why the first verses of 1 Corinthians are so surprising and so challenging. Paul doesn’t begin his letter with complaint or rebuke or disappointed finger-pointing. Instead, he tells the wayward Corinthians that “I always thank God for you.”
Wait a minute.
-Always thank God for you?!
-Always thank God for the sinful bunch of rebels who had betrayed his trust in Corinth?
-Thank God for the church which was riddled with division, pride and puffed-up human wisdom?
-Thank God for Christians who were suing one another in the law-courts and shocking even their non-Christian neighbours with their acts of sexual perversion?
-Who were disorderly in worship, dishonouring the gifts of the Spirit, and drunk at the Lord’s Supper?
-Who were led astray by false teachers and had started doubting the reality of Jesus’ resurrection?
How on earth can Paul begin his letter by telling the Corinthians that “I always thank God for you...“? He explains in the second half of the verse: “because of his grace given you in Christ Jesus.”
Instead of feeling angry and giving up in disillusion, Paul saw God’s grace at work amidst the mess. Paul wasn’t just a wishful thinker. He didn’t try to pretend that the Corinthians were doing better than they really were. “I face daily the pressure of my concern for all the churches,” he tells us in 2 Corinthians 11:28, and his intense concern is what makes these two letters so passionate. He looked sin full in the face within the messy church at Corinth, but then chose to focus his eyes on God’s gracious grace. He learned to dwell on God’s grace more than he did on human failure, and he let the truth of the Gospel save his heart from disappointment.
The Gospel reminded Paul of God’s work in the past, and this more than offset the bitter pill of the present. Every single one of those believers had once been dead in their sins and enemies of God, until God’s grace sought them out and raised them to life through his Spirit. They had not become church members because Paul convinced them it might help them to pray a sinner’s prayer, as Paul stresses by filling these opening nine verses with a series of passive verbs. They had been called by God’s initiative, sanctified through the shed blood of Jesus, and given grace in spite of their sin. They may look like a sorry bunch of washed-up, has-been Christians, but in truth they had been enriched through the Gospel. Paul had learned to focus on God at work amidst the mess, and he refused to write off anyone whom the Lord had written in.
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