30,000 Pure, Pristine American Churches
The heretic situation in our churches is significant because the American church has long thrived on our presumption of uniformity. All of our churches have particular tenets of faith, and we believe that everyone believes, interprets and applies those tenets in the same way.
When we discover that there are actually impure people in our church, we typically have treated them in much the same way.
We expel them.
We excommunicate them.
We burn them at the stake.
And our churches, once again, are purified.
The only problem?
We now have tens of thousands of completely disunified but presumably very pure churches. We have made it our obsession to make sure that our churches are theologically pure, socially pure, even politically pure. We rest easy that we can take our children to our church in the suburbs now because there will not be any harmful influences on them.
But it is all an illusion. There is no such thing as a pure church. There is no church, save maybe a cult, in which everyone thinks, believes and lives in the same way. Where two or three are gathered … those people are sure to disagree on something, even if they both call themselves “Christians.”
The pursuit of uniformity and purity has given us but one thing: fatally divided churches that still are not pure. Because more often than not, our disagreements are not over a matter in which the scriptures are 100 percent clear. They are matters in which we are free to make up our own minds and follow our own consciences.
It Is Easy to Love People We Do Not Know
You know what’s funny?
It’s easy to love poor Africans. Seriously. It’s easy. You can sponsor an African, even have the money automatically deducted from your bank account so you never even notice it. And you get a warm gooey feeling inside. Most of us will never meet the children we sponsor (ours is named Mugishu).
But what if we actually met our sponsored African children and learned the truth about them? What if we learned that their “Christianity” did not look exactly like ours? What if we found out that something that we take for granted as “truth” made absolutely no sense to them?
Would we discard them? Cancel our membership? Tell them that we can no longer love them? We would have to be pretty callous to do that.
It is easy to love people who are far away, who we will probably never meet. It is a lot harder to love and worship side by side with people.
Because we are all heretics.
What do you think? Has our pursuit of uniformity been our crippling downfall, or is it the invasion of “heretics” that has weakened our churches beyond repair?
