More Thoughts on Church

I've been interacting here with some ideas about the church lately. They've generated some interesting thoughts, provoked questions and responses, and just generally been worth tossing around.

If you know me very well, you know that I am a pastor's kid, and that a church that my dad pastored went through a very messy split approximately twelve years ago. There were a lot of ugly politics involved, a lot of blame assigned that was either wrong or unnecessary, and a lot of hurt. I struggle still with issues of hurt, trust, and forgiveness that stem from that time. I was o­nly ten, and my parents did a fairly good job of protecting us from the worst of the mess, but I was still deeply affected. And yet, the "church" as the corporate body of Christ o­n earth is something I believe in so strongly.

All of this as lead in to these... I may have mentioned before that I get a daily email with a bit of writing from the late Henri Nouwen. His writings are always inspiring, and the last few days he has focused o­n the hurts that can be caused by the church, and the way in which we should respond to those hurts. I am challenged by his words, working to apply them to my life. He writes:

The Authority of Compassion
The Church often wounds us deeply. People with religious authority often wound us by their words, attitudes, and demands. Precisely because our religion brings us in touch with the questions of life and death, our religious sensibilities can get hurt most easily. Ministers and priests seldom fully realize how a critical remark, a gesture of rejection, or an act of impatience can be remembered for life by those to whom it is directed.

There is such an enormous hunger for meaning in life, for comfort and consolation, for forgiveness and reconciliation, for restoration and healing, that anyone who has any authority in the Church should constantly be reminded that the best word to characterize religious authority is compassion. Let's keep looking at Jesus whose authority was expressed in compassion.

and

Forgiving the Church
When we have been wounded by the Church, our temptation is to reject it. But when we reject the Church it becomes very hard for us to keep in touch with the living Christ. When we say, "I love Jesus, but I hate the Church," we end up losing not o­nly the Church but Jesus too. The challenge is to forgive the Church. This challenge is especially great because the Church seldom asks us for forgiveness, at least not officially. But the Church as an often fallible human organization needs our forgiveness, while the Church as the living Christ among us continues to offer us forgiveness.

It is important to think about the Church not as "over there" but as a community of struggling, weak people of whom we are part and in whom we meet our Lord and Redeemer.