A husband and wife were sitting at the breakfast table finishing up their morning coffee. “Well,” the wife said, it’s time we start getting ready for church.” “I’m not going to church today,” her husband replied. “In fact, I don’t think I’ll go to church ever again.”
“Why on earth not?” she said. “Well, the people there just don’t like me very much and quite frankly, I’m not crazy about them.”
“Look, I’ll give you two good reasons you’ve got to go. First, you’re 42 years old, not twelve, and second you’re the preacher.”
We all know someone who at some time has stopped going to church because they discovered the church, or the pastor, was not all they thought it should be, or we know someone who has said “I don’t go to church because it’s full of hypocrites.”
We want the church to be the one perfect place in the world where we can go and rest assured that everyone will always act with Christian love and perform their Christian duty. We want the church to be our oasis in a sin weary world.
We want our sanctuary to be a refuge from pettiness and bitterness, from jealousies and disputes over seemingly unimportant issues and we become disappointed when we discover that is not always the case. We become disappointed the first time we discover that the church is made up of ordinary people who are sometimes – often times – sinful folk doing the best they can.
But why should we be surprised that church is not perfect? After all, it’s made up of people who have already confessed by the simple act of being there that they are a sinful people who cannot make it on their own.
Those of us who attend regularly throw ourselves on the mercy of God and what we find is God’s love. We also find ourselves strengthened for our day to day lives with all their ups and downs.
And just as we as individuals are saved only by grace so is the church saved only by grace. We are saved by grace alone --- not by our good works. That’s the good news. The good news is that God loves the church in spite of all its imperfections and in spite of the many ways in which it fails to hear His calling.
So if you’d like to be a part of a group of people who do the best they can and regularly screw it up, if you’d like to be a part of a group who support each other in the struggle to be more loving, if you’d like to be a part of a group of people who have found God’s grace and mercy, then as Bob Barker would say, “Come on down!” Join any church wherever you live and remember it's going to be as imperfect as you!
