I am, and always have been, a big fan of the church. It was a great source of safety and learning and spiritual growth for me and my siblings as we grew up, and it has been the entity I have served people and God through for 2/3 of my life. Like Winston Churchill’s remark about Democracy (which was probably a riff on the writings of Plato), the Church is the worst form of religion, except for all the others. I would put it more broadly; organized religion is an amazing tool for good and an atrocious vehicle for evil, but it is probably better than nothing. For almost 100 years, the church in America has been slowly dying, but recent decades have been uniquely troubling. Churches die for a lot of reasons, but I think the worse is our self-inflicted wounds.
We are dying from the inside. Whether it’s the priest abuse scandals that have been covered up for only God knows how long, or the creepy TV preacher scandals that have rocked the evangelical world, or the Amish/Old Order Mennonite sex abuse scandals, or Evangelicals pretending the president is a good person, churches are destroying themselves daily. These are just a few examples; we only have to read the news carefully to see that, left unsupervised, people do terrible things, often in the name of God. Mainline Protestant Churches are not excluded from this calamitous behavior – we have allowed a lot of bad things to happen and have done little to try to heal it. We often take our eyes off of Jesus, and act more like a social justice organization that plays at church rather than the other way around. If we don’t keep God in the center, and people’s spiritual needs as our focus, we stop being the church.
I continue to love and serve God and people through the church, and I hope and pray that we are doing most of our activities and missions in ways that God would support. I also know that being fallible human beings, we are bound to mess up sometimes. When we do, we should make amends, not cover up our mistakes. Cover-ups are what cause us to die from the inside out, losing the trust of those we should be helping; healing allows us to grow and thrive. We need a world-wide, church-wide reconciliation conference; a time to admit to the wrong we have done and to resolve to make up for all of it. The church blessed colonization – the church blessed war – the church blessed slavery and misogyny and racism and antisemitism and hatred of Muslims – and the church needs to repent, confess, and atone for the wrong we have done. Only then will we heal our self-inflicted wounds and return to being healthy again. Only then, maybe, we will stop dying from the inside.
Prayer – God, we know that we will never be perfect in this life, but we seek Your help and guidance as we work together to be better. Amen.
Today’s art is “Kindness” by Jayabrato, an artist from India.