Renewing Your Trust-In The Church (Part 2)

Renewing  Your Trust-In The Church (Part 2)

I love the Church and I love the church, yet we'd be fooling ourselves if we said that the Church was perfect currently. We act like society is crumbling because they're turning away from the Church. In truth, it's our neglect to acknowledge how the Church is spiritually failing to meet needs today because this generation is turning away from God. We preach the truth, but we don't practice it. We've turned the church into a country club for Christians rather than a filling station for sinners.

If we're honest, I don't often think God would be very proud of the way the Church is operating in Modern America. So if I can't be proud of us as a Christian then how can I possibly expect an atheist or an agnostic to see any purpose in coming at all? Jesus never instructed us to be country club Christians. Maybe it's about time we stopped acting like them.

-Maybe it's because the Church has become a club, rather than a community.

What was supposed to be a place of worship has instead become a place where Christians attend on Sundays and Wednesdays, give a little offering, and gather into their usual cliques for a feel-good message before they head on home to their regular old lives, unchanged by what goes on in the confines of the sanctuary.

-Maybe it's because the Church is often the first group to judge and the last to forgive, rather than the other way around.

Christians are very good at remembering sins and failures and forgetting about "let him who is without sin cast the first stone." Judgment is their strength, and mercy is a word they like to toss around when it means they can get something in return for it later. Forgiveness to so many isn't a wiped slate, but an IOU ready for collection at the next given opportunity.

-Maybe it's because the Church that's supposed to weed out hypocrisy has instead become the hotbed of it.

"Don't talk about people behind their backs," a regular church member might warn, right before they turn to their friends and start gossiping about what the woman sitting on the other side of the sanctuary did that morning before the service. They expect perfection but demonstrate corruption without remorse, and then act as though the observers around them are somehow in the wrong.