THE
TRANSPARENT
CHURCH

At the end of the first time the church I worked for imploded (but not the last) (more on that next time), I looked up and was amazed- God had kept Carrie and me through it, and we had come out better on the back end.

That being said…we were changed.

We were changed in a way that no one saw coming but that, in retrospect, we desperately needed.

Without knowing it, we had become permanently disillusioned with the Church.

 

Now, before you think anything else about that statement, let me define what it doesn’t mean.

To be permanently disillusioned does not mean we get to leave a church or any church for something someone has or hasn’t done to us.

To be permanently disillusioned doesn’t mean we rehash hurts over and over in our mind as a way of re-fueling bitterness.

To be permanently disillusioned doesn’t mean we don’t trust any leader, it doesn’t that we refuse to grow close to any more Christians, and it certainly doesn’t mean we don’t obey the Bible when it says we ought to “believe the best”.

So, what does it mean?

Above all others, Dietrich Bonhoeffer stated it best. I stumbled across his writings on Christian community in his book, Life Together, and he put it like this:

 

            “The serious Christian, set down for the first time in a Christian community, is likely to bring with him a very definite idea of what Christian life together should be and to try to realize it. But God’s grace speedily shatters such dreams. Just as surely as God desires to lead us to a knowledge of genuine Christian fellowship, so surely must we be overwhelmed by a great  disillusionment with others, with Christians in general, and, if we are  fortunate, with ourselves.”

 

When I read this, I almost fell over. This is it. This is the first key to surviving in the world of the Church, of Christian community: to become permanently disillusioned- to come to the end of thinking that just because we are Christians, everything is going to always work out the way we think it should or that everybody should act like they’re supposed to. In short, it won’t and they aren’t going to!

I, likely like you, have heard innumerable sermons on what the church “ought to be like” and how it “ought to look”, and no doubt these are good and right on and even necessary- after all, who wants to be a part of something that functions no differently than a country club or the United States government?

Some churches I have been a part of, and maybe the ones you have been a part of, have been amazing at casting vision for the dream of what church ought to be and ought to feel like. And dreams of church are wonderful things, without question. But, be careful which dream you love, and which dream you are more committed to!

Bonhoeffer elaborates brilliantly:

 

“He who loves his dream of community more than the Christian community itself becomes a destroyer of the latter, even though his personal intentions may be ever so honest and earnest.”

 

When I read these words, I was confronted with the darkness of my own soul and my own failure to love the people in the church more than the dream of the church.

After all, what is the church, if not the people?

How can we love a dream more than reality?

How could a husband love a dream of what his wife was supposed to be more than he just loved her?

How could a wife look at her husband and cease to love him because he wasn’t exactly walking out Ephesians 5?

He couldn’t, she couldn’t, and we shouldn’t.

I saw that the only reason I had become disillusioned was because I had been believing in something that wasn’t real- the “perfect” church.

When I saw that much of the hurt in my heart was due to falling in love with a false vision and a mirage, I was actually freed- and you can be, too, if you will become permanently disillusioned with your illusion.

You can be free in your heart to love and forgive and grow if you will let go of the illusion that somewhere out there, the perfect church exists with the perfect pastor waiting to receive you and love you and nothing will ever, never go wrong, and no one will never, ever leave you or hurt you (by the way, that place does exist- it’s called heaven. And we’re not there yet).

It’s way easier to love the idea of church than it is to love the church itself.

 

Which one are you doing?

 

Which one does Jesus do?