The ‘Jesus church’ the world wants and needs

“How can we worship a God who was a victim of abuse,” she asked me, “if we can’t love the victims of abuse sitting in the pews with us?” — From Victor Vieth’s article When God was a Victim: What a Child Abuse Survivor Taught Me about Good Friday

The world expects to find Jesus in his church, not that this means the world expects Christians or the church to be perfect.  The world just wants us to be honest.  The world is sick and tired of hypocrisy, judgement, bigotry and Pharisaic attitudes that have dominated much of church culture, ironically as the church has practiced the perennial desire of dabbling in worldly ways of running its institutions.

The world wants and needs Jesus and the only way the world will see Jesus is if the world encounters the Jesus church — the church where they encounter people who are like Jesus and are comfortable being uncomfortable.

Trouble is there are numerous barriers, from the obvious to the sorts of things that may horrify us placid Christians.

Perhaps many great candidates for faith are itching to come in and be ministered to... ah, scratch that! Maybe the best candidates for faith are those would-be new believers who might show us a thing or three about God.  It could be that God brings them into our lives to enliven our faith!

Not much of the world is bothered about entering stuffy churches or having boring conversations about theology, history and doctrine.  But there are conversations that beg to be had.

Chats about the traumas that a person has been afflicted by, the daily struggles they bear, the difficult and unanswerable questions that linger hard on their hearts, including the dysfunctions and brokenness that may plague their lives.  Chats that are more about listening and supporting than they are about advising and guiding.

Interestingly, though I said there would be little interest in conversations about theology, history and doctrine, there will be interest in these matters as a result of what they bring.  We must let others lead the conversation.  We need to be adept Jesus listeners.  It’s about them, it’s not about us.

Jesus sat not only with sinners, but he sat patiently immersed in impossible problems, and it actually appears he said very little, but what he did say had profundity.

Perhaps the world perceives Christians as spiritually aloof, proud and misguided, and the church as a protected institution.  But Jesus led a life where he actively resisted that kind of spiritually, and indeed he judged it! (Matthew 7:15-23)

Jesus is on the side of abuse victims because he was a victim himself.  He knows as much as any victim what it’s like to be silenced.

The church needs to become so interested and oriented toward the oppressed, marginalised and vulnerable that it actively resists Pharisaic Christianity.

Jesus is not on the side of the powerful church — and most of the church nowadays and throughout history is powerful.

As a church, we will know that we’re getting it right when the tens, the hundreds and the thousands are attending large services... ah, scratch that.  It’s when the tens, the hundreds and the thousands are receiving welcome and sanctuary — whoever they are, the more dinged up the better.

At a micro level, we will know we’re the church the world both wants and needs when we sit with a person at a time as Jesus would.  The church clearly needs more pastors that have been mentally ill, who have been abused, who have had addictions, who have suffered grief — and have recovered.  Pastors like this will have an innate compassion that they are compelled to live.

There are some who will read this and think, “Poppycock, Jesus said the world would despise us.”  To that I would say, “What about the mission of God?  Do we have such paucity of faith that we can’t believe God could convert every single one?”  But people will only be converted if they find God.  And they will only find God when they encounter Jesus.

The world needs Jesus, and most of the world knows it.  The problem is, the world doesn’t need the Jesus that the church often presents.

The task of the church is to embody the real, raw and messy Jesus.  If that doesn’t make us uncomfortable and put us out of our comfort zones, we’ll be doing it wrong.

Photo by Tom Parsons on Unsplash