Is the church merely a pile of rocks?

Is the church merely a pile of rocks?

In my previous post, I wrote about how the church has become married to tradition, not to the God they claim. You can read that post here. This week, I will examine the huge mound of stones that is the church. I see different kinds of stones (traditions); many are still usable, but some aren't.

Gravel 

These tiny stones were put in the mound by people who joined the church but stayed on the fringes or faded away completely. Unfortunately there are a lot of them. 

They remind me of a story I heard recently, about some pastors who were discussing a problem they were having. One said, "Our church building is being overrun by bats. Our belfry is full of them, and they're making an awful mess and scaring our members. We've thrown things at them, and rung the bells, and done everything else we can think of ~ to scare them away, but nothing has had any effect on them." 

Another pastor said, "We have the same problem. I called a pest control company and they put out some poison, but even that didn't discourage the bats." A third pastor finally spoke up. "I used to have that problem," he said, "but I've solved it. I baptized all the bats and made them members of the church. They left immediately, and they've never come back." 

Too many of our members act like those bats. Maybe they saw only the church’s faults, and not its God-given purpose and power. Maybe we didn’t make them feel welcome, or didn’t communicate the Gospel in ways that let them recognize it as good news. For whatever reason they left the church without ever really having been part of it, and their stones are now barely visible in the pile. 

Cracked stones 

The church pile includes a lot of these, because the church is made up of human beings and none of us are perfect. These stones evidently looked wonderful to the Christians who put them there, but more recent God-given insight has shown them to be faulty. The problem is not that they were put there. It's that we refuse to admit that they're faulty. Unfortunately some of them are the biggest and most obvious stones in the pile, and we're still acting as if they represent God's will. 

Some of the cracked stones were contributed by people that we consider giants of Christian history. Saint Augustine, for example, claimed that women were inferior to men and were the source of temptation and evil. His stones are still very prominent in the church mound, even though we now know that his opinion of women was wrong.

Other cracked stones were put into the church mound by Christians who mistakenly insisted that God made the white race superior to all others and wanted white people to be in charge everywhere, and that scripture supported this claim. 

If we want our churches to survive and to be effective in doing God's will, we can't keep insisting that stones like these represent God's will. We can appreciate the fact that their contributors were obeying what they thought was God's will, but we must recognize where God has now shown us that they were mistaken. 

Jewels in disguise 

The other kind of stones I see in the church mound aren't very impressive on the surface. They're like some I saw on a recent trip. At a roadside shop that sold native stones I saw a table heaped with rocks that were just splotchy, lumpy, gray blobs. I wondered,  "Why would anyone want to buy one of those ugly things?" When I  walked closer, however, I saw one of them that had been cut open, and I realized it was a geode. It was full of sparkling rose-colored crystals. 

The church stones include a lot like this. They have amazing beauty and depth, but you can't tell that by merely glancing at their surfaces. Some of our worship practices are like this. Communion, for example, has depth and value that often are not apparent in our routine ways of practicing it. 

The church's hidden-but-beautiful stones also include selfless acts of ministry aimed at promoting justice, relieving suffering, and freeing people from sinful forces that oppress them. Some of these valuable stones are contributed by famous Christians like Mother Teresa, but many more are put in the mound by unrecognized Christians daily throughout the world. 

These jewels also include bold efforts to lead the church in new directions in response to God's call. Brave laity and clergy are speaking out, saying what they understand to be God's will even when it differs from popular opinion, official church policy, or tradition. 

Laying aside the worthless stones 

If we want to be faithful to God today, we must dare to stop using the stones that God has revealed as worthless or harmful. We must bring the valuable stones to the surface and help our members see their value.  Most importantly, we must add our own stones to the pile, trying to make them the kind that will truly reflect God's glory and God's will for the church and the world. I believe that's what the church stones mean for us today.

The church has amazing beauty and depth…

but you can't tell that by merely glancing at its surface.