Real Church

Confess your sins to one another . . . that you may be healed. -James 5:16

There's a strange idea I’m unlearning these days. Actually if I'm honest, I'm not yet unlearning it at all. But I'd like to. I need to. 

The strange idea is: church is for displaying the best about us, not revealing the worst about us.

The result is: burdened, burned out, suffocating Christians and church leaders.

We’ve all heard the stats about how pastors are leaving the ministry in droves, and how all the rest would like to but don’t have a medical or law or business degree to fall back on. Is it because they feel unable to exhale the carbon dioxide of their failures and inhale the oxygen of grace? Are we letting our leaders be human beings?

And church members. How many actually enjoy small group? Honestly—how many go not out of a sense of duty?

Someone gets wonderfully converted and we all rejoice, then promptly saddle them with spiritual disciplines to help them "grow." They’re not Christians two weeks before they feel like worse failures than they ever did as an unbeliever. Maybe they were dealing crack before conversion, but at least they didn’t feel hypocritical about it.

What if we let a new convert breathe in some grace for a while? Until--I don't know--they die?

What if the leaders in a church stepped off the cliff of face-saving into the mile-long freefall of humiliating honesty and found themselves floating into the delicious clouds of actual, real, for-sinners, grace? 

What if church discipline was used not to scare sinners but to kick out those who make sinners feel alienated, from God and from others?

It is terrifying to confess sin. But so is going into surgery. Surely the life that follows surgery is better than the misery of living diseased?

It feels like death to take the mask off. Not just pain, not merely embarrassment. Death. We feel as if we are shutting down in a profound, existential way. But perhaps it is just here that the odd theme running all through the New Testament about life through death will suddenly move from mental assent to felt experience.

James tells us to confess our sins to one another that we may be healed. I can stuff my sins inside and let the sickness fester; or I can confess, and be healed. Those are my two options. That's the opposite of how reality feels. Stuffing it in feels healthy, feels like survival. One more reason we need the Bible to correct our natural intuitions about human health.

Maybe revival is just another name for corporate relaxing. Calming down. Letting our guard down. Taking off the clothes of pretense because we're clothed in Jesus' righteousness. If we say we rejoice in the gospel but cannot get honest about how we're really doing with other Christians (not everyone, but a trusted few), the diagnosis is not that we need to add something horizontal to our vertical belief. The diagnosis is that we don't have the vertical belief.

It will need to be wisely chosen friends and counselors. Even then, they may not respond in grace. They may forget their own sin, and withdraw. So this is a risk. But it is the only path of healing. And there is one Friend who will always respond in wisdom and grace, who will never withdraw.

Anyhow, something I'd like to move into more deeply in days ahead, as I consider my own disbelief and strange reluctance to calm down into honesty.