Does the world deserve a better church?

The odd thing about preaching is that what you prepare is never all that you might say, at least not in my experience. And because of this, every so often, you say something that catches even your attention. So it was one Sunday as we worked through a series of four big themes for church life.

This post originally appeared on the Eyes Turned Outwards blog.

It hit me like the proverbial ton of bricks. Just a little phrase, but a powerful one.

The world deserves a better church.

I’ve been tossing this over in my mind ever since it slipped out on Sunday as I was preaching about The Community. We’re currently thinking about four big themes for the church and The Community was all about how we relate to the wider community beyond the church. And this phrase just slipped out from somewhere.

Anyway, I’ve been turning it over in my mind and with at least one other person from church. And it seems to me that it’s a powerful phrase. It’s powerful because it’s a bit counter cultural to the way I see a lot of churches doing their thinking about the community.

If we’re honest, a lot of our churches don’t actually think the world deserves anything except judgement and punishment. That the church can be better is something we’re probably agreed upon, but that world deserves the church, well that’s another thing altogether. We look out from our safe structures and despair at the state of the world beyond our doors. But this is the world God made, the world he loves, the world over which he agonises, in fact the world for which he shed his own blood.

And if God loves the world so much that he’s willing to do whatever it takes to redeem it, then where should the church be? If we, the church, are God’s chosen mechanism for spreading his grace through our communities then what kind of church does the world deserve?

I think it deserves better than it’s getting.

I’m not criticising for the sake of it. I love the church, I believe in the church and I want to see the church be the church that the world deserves.