A lot of people that I’ve met recently have shared with me their frustrations with “organized religion.” A lot of them have been burned by religious institutions, let down by religious leaders, conned by selfish congregation members. This is just so saddening to me. I want to take people who have experienced “church” in this way and bind up their wounds. I want them to see that the church is a body of broken people, and that we can’t put our hope in anything but Christ! People will let us down, churches will do the same. My theory is that the hurt is more amplified within the church because its just a whole lot of broken people under one roof. Let’s strip it down: what does our God think about religion? What is pleasing to him? Won’t that be the kind that is most pleasing to us as well?
Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world. (James 1:27, NIV)
Light bulb moment…So that’s what God wants? He wants us to love each other, look after those who can’t provide for themselves. He wants us to bind together in a community as a “salty” people that preserve his goodness in a crooked and perverse generation. He wants us to shine out his love like stars in the milky way, that each person that he has created will recognize his goodness and love. As a body of believers, we should give freely, love deeply, act justly, and above all, remain connected to our source, our Heavenly Father.
Now that’s what I call church.
