Why Church?

For many of us under 30, "Church" is dead.  Or it ought to be left to die, because it is so out of touch with reality.  Why Church, then?

A recent Barna Group survey said that young adults 18-29 admire Jesus but can't stand the church.  Among the reasons they gave is that the Church does not "resemble Jesus."

Well duh!  That doesn't take a sociologist to prove!

Yet Jesus called people to follow him, and those who fall in line behind him have a lot in common with one another.  Many of his dedicated followers have the same distaste for the "Church" as those who won't go near a church.   We are all struggling to find new ways to follow Jesus where he leads, and we're not convinced that he is simply leading us to file through the door of the nearest church. 

But the Jesus who called us and who died for us has created a community to continue in his commandments.  The commandments are straightforward, by the way:  to love God and serve our neighbor.

So "Church" is the name for the community that follows Jesus, but the Church has to be reminded, quite often, that we are individually and together following Jesus, not following the church.  The Church has been far worse at times than irrelevant or dull.  It has been evil, misguided, foolish, self-important, and corrupt.  (So has everything else human beings have gotten into from time to time.)

So, "Why Church?"

If the Church as we have known it and know it today did not exist, Christ's call would reinvent it.  That might not be a bad idea, since if a new Church were to come into being, it wouldn't necessarily be dragging all the baggage that it does right now.  But because we're all human, we tend to also reinvent baggage and start dragging it all over again.  (* sigh *)

The best reason to be, or to reinvent, the Church is that God calls us --- in Christ --- to be in community (in fellowship), and so to be the body of Christ in the world.  All of together become his body, his hands, his feet, his sight, his hearing, his guts, his beating heart.  No one can do this alone, but all of us together, when we remember Jesus, actually re-member the body of Christ.  We put that body together again when we form a community to follow him, to act like him, to minister as he ministered, and even to risk suffering as he suffered. 

I am the church.  You are the church.  We are the church together.

"But the Church has hurt me deeply, as a lesbian/gay man/bisexual person/transgender person, etc."

The Church has hurt me too.  Although I loved the church, especially as a child, it did not love me back.  And there is only one reason I didn't walk away (run away, really):  I now see that I was being drawn by Spirit of God to follow Christ.  I was drawn to trust him even though I was painfully aware that I couldn't trust the Church. 

All of us who were painfully wounded are still loved by God, who surely must weep diviine tears over the pain which the Church has caused, even as Jesus said he wept for Jerusalem for stoning the ancient prophets to death and rejecting those whom God sent to it.  But all of us who were hurt, if we hear the compassionate and compelling voice of Jesus, are drawn to be there for one another. 

Does that sound like some kind of "survivors' network"?  Well, maybe.  But because of the guiding, caring, protecting spirit of God who watches over the ones whom God loves (all of us), Jesus is asking us to "be there" for one another.

St. John used the language of "the world" over against those who were faithful to Jesus and loved Jesus.  Recently Bible scholars, including Raymond Brown, have suggested that John's "messianic community" (around the end of the First century) were a group of believers that were either not comfortable with the rest of the "church" or actually feared that they would be hurt or destroyed. 

Yet they claimed the love and power of Jesus even when they feared rejection or pain at the hands of other believers. 

All that on top of the fact that the earliest followers of Jesus were also rejected and hurt by Jewish believers who could not accept that Jesus is Lord!

Fast forward 20 centuries!  Because the Good News of the power of God in Jesus Christ, although human nature is still terribly flawed and disappointing, we have the same opportunity and the same mission as did John's messianic community:  to gather around him as Lord, to keep faith, to love another with a fierce and sacrificial love.

In other words, to be the Church, even when we are deeply hurt and disappointed by the Church.  This is our mission.  This is "why Church."