Lord knows how many times I have tossed churchly keys and thrown myself on a couch of religious despair. I have felt the expansive loneliness of not being able to turn apprehension about the church into prayer.
I’ve been embroiled in the ups and downs of church my whole life. I know how religious sausage is made—both the ingredients and the process. As an insider to the church, I know all the yuck of what we are made of and how we fail to deal with it righteously. Despair, dejection, hopelessness, impotence, irritation, anger, and depression have knocked on the door of my heart with great persistence over a long period of time. To be fair, there are of course wonderful moments in ministry where we see lightbulbs of insight shine bright, healing come with its joy, and deliverance from evil relieve the victim and spread hope and peace to their family and friends.
However, viewed from any number of angles, the church is in oodles of trouble. Modern forms of media make it impossible for the church to hide her sins, her hypocrisy. The church’s easy dismissal or even dehumanizing hate for those she deems to be wrong adds to her failure to look and sound anything like Jesus. Compelling or even plausible reasons to consider faith in Jesus and to attend church are, for many, hard to find. Jesus seems eclipsed by the dark shadow of bad religion.
That said, after long years working in the church, both sinning and being sinned against within her, I still believe in the body of Christ—the church. Why? Because I believe in Jesus now more than ever. Jesus summons and establishes the church, his body, the ones elected to keep the movement going started by Jesus.
I am captivated by Jesus’ intrinsic goodness and his inherent wisdom, and by the fact that his power was always selflessly exercised for the good of others. I am motivated to embrace his movement by the notion that even right now he is living the most consequential life imaginable as he stewards humanity and all God’s creation to its intended fulfillment. I find it stunningly compelling that he invites me, and you, and unchurched doubters—with our sins, reservations, errors, and confusions—to be in on that story.
It Has Always Been This Way
Messed-up church is the way it has always been. Church history does not unfold like a series of ups and downs that one might trace on a line graph: up at the resurrection, down at Doubting Thomas, up at the church fathers, down at Constantine, up at the Reformation, down in our day. No, the reality of church life is that it unfolds like train tracks, protracted stretches of both/and, of simultaneity, of good and bad religion all mixed up together in local churches and in individual people.
The problematic elements in the body of Christ have been in play since, with twelve close friends, Jesus roamed Nazareth, Galilee, Judea, and Samaria. That band of followers, and the historic body of which Jesus is the head, has never been perfect. Skeptical onlookers would have always had ample reason to reject Jesus because of the close company he kept. Peter, after protesting that he would never do so, denied Jesus. “There you go,” an onlooker might have said, “I knew Jesus’ followers were hypocrites!” Like angry marketing agents, whose message was not cutting through the clutter, James and John wanted to call down fire on whole cities who they deemed did not welcome Jesus with enough enthusiasm. I can hear a skeptic saying: “Christians are emotionally unstable and should not be trusted with power!” Jesus washed the feet of Judas the deceiving betrayer, to which someone might respond: “Those friends of Jesus are in it just for the pieces of silver they get out it!”
The church does not need to be perfect for the purposes of God to advance. But that is not an excuse for the church to be an agent of darkness or abuse that forces unbelievers to grope for the God who is actually very close. Perfection is not the goal—rather, the goal is to be people whose lives suggest the plausibility of the Christ-story.
Remain a Christian?
Even if we desperately want to, there is really no place to hide with our church hurts and religious disappointment. If we stop going to church, we still drag our letdowns around like a bag of rocks. They still trouble our soul, driving us nuts like a car alarm that won’t shut off. If we cut off people from our old life, we just add loneliness to bad religion. The vast majority of people who have left the church tell me the one thing they regret is the loss of relationships that were facilitated at church.
But by turning to Jesus in the way I suggest, something else happens that is rejuvenating: the Bible, even with all the controversy and doubt that surrounds it, becomes alive and beloved again. The pages of the Gospels become a pop-up greeting card, surprising us, confirming to us again the virtuousness of Jesus and thereby inviting us, if not compelling us, to find life and the meaning of life in him. And more: the letters of John and Peter present testimonies of what it was like to walk firsthand with Jesus, the real Jesus, not the Jesus battered by the long history of bad religion. I always wondered: could the stories they tell and the ideas they communicate be determinative of Christian spirituality, rather than the latest study showing the demise of church though shrinking attendance and the effects of bad religion?
It is such a pop-up moment that I hope for—to gain a fresh hearing for Jesus by patiently listening to his aims, on his terms, in his words. In times of war, persons and property are bombed to bits. Occasionally we see a picture of a baby, a mom, or a young, brave, self-sacrificing soldier, or some artifact of cultural value being rescued from the rubble. My hope is to rescue the reputation of Jesus from the rubble of bad religion.
If we paused for a moment of honesty, each of us could enumerate and describe the ways and incidences in which we, individually, along with institutional forms of religion, collectively, have co-opted Jesus for our own biased, selfish, and broken aims, burying our image of him in the wreckage of false spirituality. I seek to liberate our understanding of Jesus, to center him in the town square of our hearts and let him speak for himself, revealing his aims, and thereby giving the basis for, and calling us to, human life as God intended.
Adapted from What Jesus Intended by Todd D. Hunter. ©2023 by Todd D. Hunter. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press. www.ivpress.com.
