How to move past blaming the church?
This is a hard question to address because people in the name of the church have done some horrendous things in the past. You might be thinking of the crusades, especially the last one, where the Christian army, robbed and killed other Christians to fund and feed their army. There is also the many kings or leaders who, after the reformation, sought to wipe out whole denominations to maintain power and control. There are witch trials that saw people accusing and killing people they didn’t like or understand. Or you may be thinking more recently of the racism, sexism, or colonial attitudes that have been propagated through the church. You may have experienced evil and selfishness in the church as I have. These are all awful things that we should denounce and say are wrong.
Except, if we were to blame or denounce the church in this way, we really have no choice but to blame everything, even ourselves. Every institution, every culture, every person has a history or an ancestory of this. We are right in one regard and that is the church should be better. It should be a place where justice, mercy and love is shown and, though I have not lived through all of these time, I would say that it has. The church has often pointed the way towards justice, equity and mercy. Its many leaders paved the way for the freedom of slaves in England, it created and pushed forward common education and medicine in most countries, it welcomed those that are different and made space for them.
Just because this doesn’t happen in every place or with every person who calls themselves a Christian is not a reason to denounce the church, it is rather a reason to try to remove corruption, or call leaders into account. The difficulty is that the church will always make room for people like this too. We are a community of confessing sinners, knowing that we have needed a second chance, if not a third or fourth or fifth and so on. This means that we will take and welcome the known sinners, hoping that through following Christ they will be reshaped and reformed into the image of Christ, but even followers will end up following themselves sometimes.
This is usually the hardest part of accountability. Christians are people that confess that Jesus is our Lord, master and saviour. That means that we are meant to follow him before ourselves. In our own lives and historically, Jesus has pointed our way towards things that we are not comfortable with or that sometimes we don’t yet understand or agree with. For those that come to the church as primarily a social enterprise/institution, they will bang up against God’s Lordship and often go wrong. There are many Christians who don’t understand this fundamental point and there are still many more who struggle as there own desires wrestle with their giving control to Christ. I believe these two realities can account for most evil and they ignore the fundamental tenant of our faith.
An added piece is that I believe the church’s role is to point towards the ideal, but make room for the broken. This means that even the best leaders will find themselves making room for something that they really struggle with hoping that God will redeem even that. We would all struggle with that, but redemption and reconciliation with God and one another is the only real way forward. There are many things our leaders are struggling over together, searching for God’s will in the midst of it.
Lastly, and I believe this is most often the biggest underlying issue when someone is blaming or disowning the church, we don’t want anyone else to be our master. We want things the way we want them. We want control. We want to fulfill our desires, even if that means ignoring much of the truth that surrounds that pursuit. We often think we know better than God, so we would rather follow ourselves. God continually shows us how wrong we are, how much we depend on others and him, but again we ignore, we blame, we denounce, so often to uphold ourselves. We often create good excuses. Most people can talk themselves out of the hole they have dug, but in the end they are, really, still in that hole. The only way out is to take the hand of he who has not fallen in. The master and saviour who wants to show all of us a better way. The church is meant to be the primary place where that is heard, seen, shared, experienced, and where people have a chance to try, fail and practice at bringing it about.
