Letters to My Non-Churchgoing Friends (#11: What is Justification?)

Dear Friend:
In my last letter, I mentioned that among the reasons people don't get connected to a church is their confusion over two words: sin and justification. The first word is misunderstood, sometimes by Christians themselves, who often use it as Gatling Gun to pound others into spiritual submission. I tried to present a Biblical understanding of sin in my last letter.

Justification is a common enough word in everyday speech. That's both a plus and a minus for people trying to understand the Christian faith. It's a plus because the word as used in the Bible is similar enough to common usage that even people who've never read the Bible have some sense of what it means when Christians use it. "Joe gave his extreme fatigue as justification for his unkind words," we might say. In other words, Joe claims his exhaustion as an excuse for being unkind.

But Biblical justification deals with the fact that sin, all sin, is a violation of God's will and that the rightful punishment for our sin is serious. Very serious. "The wages of sin is death," the first century preacher Paul writes in the New Testament book of Romans. Murdering someone--and Jesus makes clear that murder includes making another person feel small with unkind names--is punishable by death. Telling lies or half-truths about others' actions is punishable by death. So is stealing from someone else, committing adultery, coveting what others have, or failing to use God's Name for anything but prayer, praise, or thanksgiving.

Before you accuse me of guilting you, let me hasten to add: I'm a sinner who has violated everyone of God's commands, in thought if not in action. I deserve to die and I have no justfication, no excuses, to offer for all my sinning. Death, as the Bible understands it, is eternal separation from the source of life, God. So, like Paul writing in another place, I might readily ask, "Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?" (Romans 7:24)

That's where justification comes in. Although we deserve to be separated from God forever and God will respect our decision to go our own ways without Him, God loves us too much to give up on us without a fight. And so, God has taken action, sending His Son Jesus Christ into the world. Though sinless, Jesus took the punishment for sin you and I deserve and gives justification to all who give their lives to Him. Jesus explains it this way in the Bible's most famous passage, a verse that Martin Luther called "the gospel--the good news--in a nutshell":

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life." (John 3:16)

When we renounce our sin and let Jesus Christ be the Lord of our lives, we are justified. As a homely old saying puts it, "I enter God's kingdom 'just' as 'if I'd' never sinned." Through Christ, we are reconciled with God and the power of sin over our lives--including separation from God--is canceled.

Justification is the most important teaching of the Bible. In Christ, God excuses us of our sins and gives us the free gift of life with Him forever. No wonder that Paul writes at another place in the New Testament:

"For I am not ashamed of the gospel; it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith..." (Romans 1:16)

Sincerely,
Mark

[Here are links to the first ten installments in this series:
Letters to My Non-Churchgoing Friends (#1: Can You Be Christian without the Church?)
Letters to My Non-Churchgoing Friends (#2: Worship is Boring)
Letters to My Non-Churchgoing Friends (#3: Is the Church Filled with Hypocrites?)
Letters to My Non-Churchgoing Friends (#4: The Church Only Wants My Money)
Letters to My Non-Churchgoing Friends (#5: "I'm Not Good Enough")
Letters to My Non-Churchgoing Friends (#6: Finding Community, Meeting God)
Letters to My Non-Churchgoing Friends (#7: Why Can't I Find a Church That Believes What I Want It to Believe?)
Letters to My Non-Churchgoing Friends (#8: Disappointed with the Church?)
Letters to My Non-Churchgoing Friends (#9: My Spouse Isn't Supportive)
Letters to My Non-Churchgoing Friends (#10: Confusion About Sin)]

Letters to My Non-Churchgoing Friends (#1: Can You Be Christian without the Church?)

[This series of posts, which are to be columns I submit to the Community Press newspapers, for whom I've been writing since 1996, are heartfelt letters to non-churchgoing people. My hope is that whether people are active participants in the lives of local congregations, only occasionally worshipers, Christian skeptics, or atheists, all will find them useful.]

Dear Friend:
Since you and I may never meet personally, I've decided to send a few letters to you about why so many people choose to be part of the church. And why you might want to make the same choice.

If we did actually talk together, our conversation wouldn't be as one-sided as these letters are. I could ask you questions and listen to your story. But at least for now, that option isn't open to us.

Nonetheless, I do think I have some understanding of why you might not be part of a church. For more than a decade of my life, I considered myself to be an atheist. I had little use for churches or Christians.

Most non-churchgoing people aren't atheists, of course. They just don't see the need for being part of a church. This leads me to the most common reason I hear non-churchgoing friends give for not participating in a church. They say, “I can be as good a Christian without the Church as I can be with it.”

If you you said this to me, there are two main things I might say in response.

The first thing is that being Christian isn’t about being good.

Don't misunderstand me. God does care about whether we treat others well and that we not violate His will. But good morals aren't the object of the Christian life. Better morality is a byproduct of a strong relationship with God. (Although no Christian will ever be morally faultless this side of the grave. I'm speaking from personal experience here. More on that in a future letter.)

Being a Christian is really about having a relationship with the God we meet in Jesus Christ. That relationship begins when we acknowledge our moral deficiencies, asking God to help us to turn away from sin and to surrender our whole lives to Christ. Turning away from sin is what the Bible calls repentance. Surrendering to Christ is what it calls faith. When we repent and believe in Christ, God sends His Holy Spirit to initiate a makeover of our souls. He also intends for us to be part of a church where we can be supported in living our faith and support others in living theirs.

That leads to the second thing I might say if you told me that you can be as good a Christian without the church as you can be with it.

I would tell you that it may be theoretically possible to maintain a vital relationship with God outside of the fellowship of the church. But only theoretically.

Two-thousand years of church history suggest that no one is likely to remain a faithful Christian without a connection to the living organism of the church, which the Bible calls "the body of Christ."

"What about Bono, lead singer of the rock band, U2?" you might ask. "Isn't he a Christian who doesn't belong to a church?"

Bono, who is one of my heroes, is often described as a nonchurchgoing Christian. And it's true that he doesn't belong to a congregation. But Bono is networked with the church. Much of his work on debt relief and AIDS-eradication in Africa is done with the cooperation of the church. Bono is more connected to the church than even he might realize.

Asserting that we can be Christian without the church is sort of like saying, "I don't need to regularly eat food or drink water to live." Those who forego food and water will die. Without the fellowship of the Church, our faith dies.

Tell me what you think.

Sincerely,
Mark

Letters to My Non-Churchgoing Friends (#10: Confusion About Sin)

[I'm writing a series of "letters" to non-churchgoing folks in my community through a column I write for the Community Press here in the Cincinnati area. To see the first nine, go here.]

Dear Friend,
One reason people give for not going to church is their mystification at two words--and their different forms--which Christians use a lot: sin and justification.

Non-churchgoing folks hear Christians say things using these terms in all manner of strange ways:

• I’m a sinner.
• All have sinned and fall short of God’s glory.
• Christ justifies sinners.
  

I’m not sure that we Christians always know what we’re talking about when we say stuff like this. So, mystification on the parts of those who aren’t part of a church is understandable.

What is sin, from a Biblical perspective? And what does it mean to be justified? In this column, I’ll talk about sin. In the next, I’ll tackle justification.

I like to draw a distinction between Sin, capital s, and sin, lower case s. Sin, upper case, is the condition into which every person who comes into this world in the normal way is born. In the Old Testament, King David, a person so revered for his faith that the Bible calls him “a man after God’s own heart,” admits that he was born in sin. The only sinless person on this planet since Adam and Eve fell into sin has been Jesus Christ. The rest of us though, are born in this Sin condition.

Sin is alienation from God and other people. And it’s part of us from the beginning. We’re born addicted to ourselves, our desires, our wants, and our agendas.

If an infant takes a liking to an object which his or her parents know could cause injury or death, that baby will scream like mad when the object is taken from it. That’s because the condition of Sin drives us to think only of that which is pleasing to ourselves, without regard to what’s good for us or others.

The Bible teaches that, without help, our slavery to Sin will inevitably drive us to commit sins, small s. Those individual sins are summarized in the Ten Commandments and include:

• putting anything in a more important position than God;
• using God’s Name for anything other than prayer, praise, or thanksgiving; ignoring God’s Word, refusing to join others in worshiping God, and not resting once a week;
• failing to respect our parents;
• killing others in thought, word, or deed;
• sexual intimacy outside of marriage;
• taking anything belongs to others;
• gossiping or telling untruths about others; and
• craving the possessions or lifestyles of other people.
  

I don’t know about you, but when I look at this list, I recognize that whether in thought, word, or deed, I’ve violated each of God's commandments. I’ve allowed my Sin condition to lead me to commit sins.

Deep down, I don’t want to sin. I recognize how my sins hurt me, my life, others, and, I’ve learned, even God.

Each time I sin, I add another brick to the wall separating me from others, from the person I want to be, and from God and eternal life. This is true even when, with good intentions, I make resolutions to do better and fail to do so, repeatedly.

Like Paul, a writer in the New Testament, I want to say, “I've tried everything and nothing helps. I'm at the end of my rope. Is there no one who can do anything for me? Isn't that the real question?” (Romans 7:24)

Who, Paul asks and I ask, can make it possible for a born sinner like me to be freed from my slavery to sin so that I can live with God forever? That really is the question. And justification, which I’ll talk about next time, is the real answer. God’s answer.

Letters to My Non-Churchgoing Friends (#7: Why Can't I Find a Church That Believes What I Want It to Believe?)

[This is the seventh in a series of columns I'm writing for the Community Press newspapers. They're meant to be loving responses to what my non-churchgoing friends say keeps them from being part of the church.]

Dear Friend:
Sitting in my office one day, the phone rang. When I answered, a woman asked, "Are you the pastor?" "Yes," I said. "I've been calling churches all over Cincinnati," she told me. "So far, I haven't found what I'm looking for." "What exactly are you looking for?" I asked.

"Well," she explained. "I believe in Jesus and stuff. But I can't find a church that believes in reincarnation. Does your church believe in reincarnation?" "No." She was frustrated. Here she believed in "Jesus and stuff," yet she couldn't find a single Christian church that believed in reincarnation.

In this era of hyperindividualism, many people want to create their own religions, belief systems that cater to their specific prejudices and dispositions.

I'd be lying if I claimed that I didn't find that somewhat appealing. There are aspects of Christian faith and life that I find personally inconvenient, things like the call to servanthood and giving. Or, the necessity of confessing my sins and surrendering my life to Jesus Christ. Life would be easier if I didn't try to be what the Bible calls a disciple.

But each of us is confronted with a choice: Whether to go our own ways or to surrender to the God we meet in Jesus Christ. Faithful churches insist on our common need to surrender.

When I was in elementary school, I resisted as my father and grandfather forced me to memorize the multiplication tables I was supposed to be learning. I couldn't have cared less if 5-times-nine equaled 45. Besides, why couldn't 5-times-9 equal 46 if I wanted them to sometimes? For someone as math-challenged as I was--and remain, the multiplication tables were an inconvenient truth and way more trouble than I wanted.

Over thousands of years, through thousands of people, God has revealed Himself, His identity, and His will to all of us. We have a book that catalogs these many encounters, including the ultimate encounter, when God took on flesh in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, died on a cross, and rose from death in order to save all the lost people on this planet who dare to follow Him. That book is the Bible. Others may disagree, but Christians believe that it is, as we Lutheran Christians put it, "the authoritative source and norm of our life, faith, and practice."

Under the prompting of God's Holy Spirit, our understanding of the teachings of the Bible may change over time. And different Christian traditions may emphasize some Biblical teachings more than others. But all believe that human beings are called not to look for a God or a religion that caters to what we prefer, but to follow the one true God of the universe Who has revealed Himself to us in Jesus Christ. The Bible, in a way, is God's multiplication table and in the end, it does us no good to pretend that 5-times-9 equal anything but 45.

"There is a way that seems right to a person, but its end is the way to death." (Proverbs 14:12) Christian faith, for all its inconvenience and challenge, promises us new life that lasts forever.

So, I pray that while you find a church where you feel at home, you never find one in which you feel completely comfortable. May you never find a church fellowship that accommodates any beliefs or inclinations you have that are contrary to God's will as revealed in the Bible.

I pray that you find a church home that challenges you to follow Jesus even when it's inconvenient to do so.

Sincerely,
Mark

[You might want to send this link to a friend. It contains the first seven installments of this series.]

Letters to My Non-Churchgoing Friends (#9: My Spouse Isn't Supportive)

Dear Friend,
In these letters, I’m addressing common reasons people give for not participating in a local church. Here’s one I often hear from married people: “I can’t get my spouse interested in church. With no support at home, it’s hard for me to motivate myself to even find a church home.”

Statements like these have, in the past, usually been made by wives about their husbands. I personally believe that the reason for this is that historically, in every culture, men have been taught that they don’t need others, not even God. For men who believe this, the idea that we need to admit our sins and surrender to a Savior is radical. I believe it even frightens them. Our bluster about not needing a church or our claim that we can just as effectively worship God on the fairway of Hole 13 often masks our fear. (I know. I’m a recovering control freak who used to like to keeping my life God-free.)

The New Testament portion of the Bible, both in its accounts of Jesus’ earthly ministry and in the letters written by some of His earliest followers, shows us that women have always been more open than men to Christ’s call to repentance and new life through faith in Him. This may partly be because in the cultures in which Christian faith first took hold, women occupied an inferior status. They didn’t suffer from the control freak hangups that so often prevent men from pursuing a life of faith.

But more importantly, through Christ, women saw that in God’s eyes, men and women, both made in God’s image, are equal.

In recent years though, I’ve met a number of married couples in which the traditional pattern has been reversed: the man has wanted a connection to Christ and the church, while the woman resists it. Whichever spouse disdains church involvement, it’s hard for the other spouse.

This is what I tell married people who want to be part of the church, yet are married to folks for whom that isn’t important:

1. Don’t let the objecting spouse keep you from being involved in a church. If you believe that the church is important for your spiritual well-being and growth--and I obviously believe that’s true, you should forge ahead with church involvement. Make it clear that weekly worship and pursuing your own personal area of Christian service are priorities in your life.

2. Don’t criticize your spouse when she or he refuses to go to worship or church functions with you. No one has ever been successfully harried or insulted into faith in Christ or church involvement.

3. Pray for your spouse. Ask God to open their will and heart to the possibility of church involvement.

4. Enlist the prayer support of Christian friends. Ask them to ask God to help you to maintain a strong connection with the church and to pray for that openness in your spouse I mentioned above.

5. Love your spouse.

I can’t guarantee that resistant spouses will join you in worship if you follow these steps. But I can guarantee that if you don’t follow them, they won’t be involved and it’s possible that you’ll lose your motivation, too. Don’t let anything keep you from being connected to Christ and His church!

Sincerely,
Mark

Letters to My Non-Churchgoing Friends (#6: Finding Community, Meeting God)

[This is the sixth in a series of "letters" I'm writing for my column in the Community Press newspapers.]

Dear Friend,
A major coffee house chain speaks of making their establishments the "third place" to which people gravitate. The first place, naturally enough, is home and the second is work. Their coffee shops, they believe, can be the third place, a touchstone where customers make connections with the larger world and can do so without the pressures to be productive that we face in the workplace. (All the while filling the coffee shops' cash registers, of course.)

The coffee house chain is onto something. Especially in an impersonal age in which our professions often take us far from our roots, we need to make connections with others.

There are many ways to fill our need for community, of course. Coffee shops can, to some extent, fill that need as they fill our cups. Even though I don't drink coffee, I enjoy sitting in coffee shops. I sometimes even fantasize emulating a pastor acquaintance of mine who does a lot of his work and writes all of his helpful books while sitting in such a shop, periodically interrupting himself to talk with baristas and other customers.

But in fact, I think that the best way for us to experience that sense of connectedness to others that we both need and crave is the Church. It's a non-commercial community where, to paraphrase the words of an old hymn, we can, with others, come to God "just as we are, without one plea."

Christian faith, as I mentioned in an earlier letter, is primarily about relationships. The Bible reveals that our relationships with God and with others are distorted by a condition it calls sin. The Church is the family insituted by God through which people can turn from sin, get involved in a relationship with Christ, and be encouraged to experience things like wholeness, joy, forgiveness, power for living, and hope for this life and the next, through their relationships with other "recovering sinners."

Relationships and community have two dimensions in the church. There's the horizontal dimension common anywhere else in the world. This dimenion is about our relationships with other people.

But the church is also the place that helps us to experience the vertical dimension of community. This vertical dimension involves God's relationship with us and ours with God.

That both of these dimensions are essential to our wholeness as people is indicated by the answer Jesus once gave to a man who asked, "What is the greatest commandment?" Jesus said that actually, the greatest commandment is composed of two parts: Loving God completely and loving our neighbors as we love ourselves.

When Jesus speaks of love, He isn't talking so much about affection. He's talking about a tough-minded commitment to honoring God and doing what is best not just for ourselves, but for our neighbors. Even when those neighbors are people like wives, husbands, children, or friends.

Love like this doesn't come naturally to us. Which is probably why the book of Hebrews urges Christians not to neglect to "meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another..." In the church, God encourages us and we who worship, study, serve, and give together encourage each other to love as Christ has loved us. You might get that at a coffee shop; but you will certainly get it at most churches, even the smallest.

In the fellowship of the church, we find a third place where God teaches us how to love and, in so doing, also teaches us how to live.

Sincerely,
Mark

[Mark Daniels is pastor of Friendship Church, a Lutheran congregation. Weekly worship celebrations happen Saturdays at 5:30PM and Sundays at 10:00AM at 1300 White Oak Road, Amelia.]

[Here are links to the first five installments in this series:
Can You Be Christian Without the Church?
Worship is Boring
Is the Church Filled with Hypocrites?
The Church Only Wants My Money
I'm Not Good Enough]

Letters to My Non-Churchgoing Friends (#2: Worship is Boring)

Dear Friend:
In this second letter, I want to deal with an entirely different objection people raise to being part of a church. "It's boring," they say.

The comment usually relates to worship and there are variations on this theme heard from non-churchgoers, whatever the "flavor" of church they've experienced. People will say:

• "The praise songs are repetitive and brain dead."
• "The sermon goes on forever."
• "They use words I've never heard before."
• "I don't get those old hymns. The music drags and the lyrics make no sense to me."
• "What's with the organ?" (Or the guitar, the drums, the keyboard, the kazoos?)

There's a lot of truth to the idea that worship is boring, even in churches with excellent preachers and great musicians. It sometimes seems that we churches and preachers have a goal to so bore people that they won't want to have anything to do with God.

But more than the imperfect efforts of pastors and congregations lay behind this common complaint. It also has to do with our expectations of any public "presentation."

Today, we have constant access to slickly produced movies, music, dramas, comedies, video games, and reality shows. We can watch them on our TVs, at movie theaters, and on our computers and iPods. Even compared with the average, perfectly-coiffed local anchorperson talking about a fifty-car freeway pile-up, the stuff that goes on in worship can seem lame.

Of course, the Good News of a God Who wants to set us free from our sins, hurts, and addictions so that we can have more of life today and an eternity with God, is pretty exciting stuff. But socialized to believe that only violent theft in video games, "hook-ups" with multiple partners, and smash mouth tackling in the NFL are really exciting, it's often hard for us to see the excitement of a life with God.

Most churches and pastors, I think, will try to be interesting. And we know that Jesus Christ, God in the flesh, knew the value of entertaining people to educate them about life with God: His stories, called parables, both entertain and call people to faith even today.

But there's something important for us to understand: The purpose of weekly worship isn't to entertain us.

Worship is about taking our gazes off of of our own lives.

• It's about turning our attention to God.
• It's about praising God for sending His Son to die on the cross and rise from the dead for us.
• It's about God giving us our marching orders for the week to come.
• It's about re-orienting ourselves to the call to turn from sin and to believe in Jesus Christ.
• It's about being empowered to once more dedicate ourselves to the lifestyle of truly "human" beings: love of God, love of neighbor.
• It's about drawing strength and inspiration from other worshipers.
  

Worship, in short, is surrender to God. I used to hate the idea of surrendering control of my life to God. I still rebel against it sometimes.

But weekly worship reminds us of a fundamental fact of life: God is God and I'm not.

That's not always welcome news, especially for many of us in America, accustomed to having just what we want when we want it. But if it isn't welcome news, it is good news. We don't have to carry the weight of the world on our shoulders! We can give our lives to God and He'll keep pumping a new and better life with Him into us!

If even a boring worship service helps us to surrender to God, it will have done its job.

Sincerely,
Mark

[THANKS TO: Joe Gandelman of The Moderate Voice for linking to this post. You can find the other installments in this series by clicking on any of the labels below.]

[THANKS ALSO TO: Bruce Armstrong of Ordinary Everyday Christian for linking to the first two posts in this series.]

Letters to My Non-Churchgoing Friends (#4: The Church Only Wants My Money)

Dear Friend:
Today I want to discuss a fourth reason people give for not being involved in a church. Some say: "The church only wants my money."

I need to tell you something. As a Lutheran, I'm part of a Christian movement which, secondarily anyway, began with disgust over money the Church was "guilting" people into giving, usually money they didn't have to give.

Martin Luther, a German monk, priest and professor, began our movement and what's called 'The Reformation' when he nailed ninety-five theses--or statements for theological debate--on a church door in Wittenberg, Germany on October 31, 1517. The immediate motivator for Luther's action was his digust with a practice of the Roman Church of his day, that of selling pieces of paper known as indulgences. The church claimed that people who bought these documents got time out of a place called purgatory for themselves or their loved ones. (Luther also came to challenge the very idea of a place called purgatory.)

At the root of Luther's challenge of indulgences was the idea that a relationship with God or eternity with God could be bought or sold or earned. Luther insisted, and Lutherans insist today, that God's gifts of everlasting life, reconciliation with God, and forgiveness of sin are really gifts. They're freely granted to people willing to give up their dependence on sin and entrust their lives to Jesus Christ.

Having said this, you should nonetheless know that churches do want your money. They want my money, too. But, I hope they do so for the right reasons, two of which come to mind immediately.

The first is a practical one. Simply put, without money, churches find it harder to fulfill their missions.

But there's a second reason. One movement in the Church calls it, "the need of the giver to give." When we willingly make giving to God's work the first expenditure to come out of our paychecks, we drive a stake into the heart of our common tendency toward selfishness. (This is what the Bible calls crucifying the old self.) We tell God that we're grateful for Christ and that we're putting Him first in our lives.

For years at our congregation, we've made an announcement at the beginning of our worship celebrations, asking first-time visitors not to give any money when the offering baskets are passed around. "It's our privilege to have you with us today," we say. We want visitors to know that we care more about them as people than as owners of wallets.

But not every visitor likes it when we say this. One person who worshiped with us for the first time several years ago had already become an enthusiastic believer in giving the first ten per cent of her income to the work of the church. She eventually became a member of our congregation and told us that when, during her first visit, first-timers were urged not to make an offering, she thought, "There's no way you're going to keep me from giving!" That woman is what the Bible calls a "cheerful" or "hilarious" giver. She understands that the church needs money to do its work and that giving to God's work feels good. Giving has become a huge blessing in her life!

Honestly, giving doesn't come easily to me. And I hate it when churches become obsessed with money, treating people like sources of revenue rather than children of God. But people like that woman remind me of why the church wants our money. And why that's a good thing.

Sincerely,
Mark

[UPDATE: Spencer Troxell, one of my favorite people, responds to the first three installments of this series here. PS: I've never met any Zoroastrians either.]

"Letters to My Non-Churchgoing Friends"

This is a series of columns I wrote last year. In each one, I address, I hope respectfully, reasons given by my non-churchgoing friends and acquaintances for not being part of the Church:

Letter #1 ("I don't need the church to be a Christian")
Letter #2 ("Worship is boring")
Letter #3 ("The church is full of hypocrites")
Letter #4 ("The church only wants my money")
Letter #5 ("I'm not good enough to be in church")
Letter #6 (Finding Community, Meeting God)
Letter #7 (Why can't I find a church that believes what I believe?)
Letter #8 ("I was disappointed by the church")
Letter #9 ("I can't get my spouse interested in church")
Letter #10 ("What is sin anyway?")
Letter #11 ("What is justification?")

Letters to My Non-Churchgoing Friends (#3: Is the Church Filled with Hypocrites?)

Dear Friend:
In my first letters, I've addressed two big reasons that people give for not being part of a church: that they don't need the church to be Christian and that worship is boring.

Here, I want to talk about a third reason: "The church is full of hypocrites."

Our word hypocrite is a transliteration of a Greek word found in the New Testament, hupokrites. It was a term originally used of actors, people who have one identity but act another way on stage. It came to be used of any person who "acted" in ways different from the beliefs they claimed to hold.

Honestly, the church is full of hypocrites. I'm one of them. I say one thing and often, live another; think one thing and do another.

In my better moments, I do love God and I do love my neighbor, as Jesus commands. In such moments, I'm a standup guy with pure thoughts, pure motives, pure actions.

But during the other twenty-three-hours-and fifty-five-minutes of my days, I'm not so pure. I’m a lot like Saint Paul, who wrote in the New Testament portion of the Bible: “I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.”

A war constantly rages inside any person who genuinely tries to live out their faith in Jesus Christ. It's a conflict between the new part of us that wants to follow Christ and the old part that wants to get our own ways. From moment to moment, we Christians need God's help in order to choose which side will win this internal war.

And this is where the church comes in. A man told me once, "The church would be an empty place if God didn't let the sinners in." Every person who worships in every church is a sinner, most of whom want to live more like Christians.

The church is God's hospital for hypocrites, the best place for us to come to confess our sins, receive God's forgiveness, hear God's Word for our lives, and draw strength for the battle to become less hypocritical and more authentic as followers of Christ.

The church is God's support group for recovering hypocrites. Like those recovering from other addictions, church people sometimes find the allure of sin overpowering. At the party, the husband becomes unkind in his remarks about his wife. The teen fibs about why he couldn't make his curfew. The woman gets so carried away with her frustrations at work that she begins to gossip about a co-worker. The preacher uses God's name for something other than prayer, praise, and thanksgiving.

The church is where hypocrites like these--hypocrites like me--need to be.

If you ever say one thing and do another, the church may be the best place for you too.

Sincerely,
Mark

Letters to My Non-Churchgoing Friends (#5: "I'm Not Good Enough")

Dear Friend:
I want to discuss another reason that people sometimes give for not being involved with a church.

During my seminary internship, I met one of the most exasperating people I've ever met. Mary, not her real name, was a resident at a nursing home which my internship supervising pastor and I visited monthly. Mary had all her mental and physical faculties. But she had moved to the nursing home to be near a nephew and a niece, her only living relatives. Mary was a sweet person. But what made her exasperating was her complete refusal to believe that God might want to have anything to do with her.

When the supervising pastor and I visited the nursing home, we invited all the residents to join us for a simple worship celebration in which they could sing a hymn, hear a reading from Scripture, and receive Holy Communion. Mary came to these services. She sang the hymns from memory and could recite the Bible passages we read. But whenever we offered Holy Communion, Mary refused. "I'm not good enough," she told us.

I've heard Mary's statement in many forms, not just as a reason for refusing Holy Communion, but also for not being part of a church altogether. "No church would want me," they say. "I'm not a good enough person."

There's nothing wrong with feeling guilt for our actions. Failing to acknowledge our sins erects walls between God and us, between our neighbors and us. That's unhealthy. Guilt can be a trigger for us to admit the ways in which we've hurt God and other people and to seek reconciliation. That's healthy.

But Mary's problem wasn't guilt. And guilt isn't the issue of those who claim that they're not good enough to be part of a church. In both instances, the real issue is shame. There is a difference.

Guilt is regret over things we've done. Shame is regret for who we are. Guilt can lead to a proactive commitment to positive change. Shame leads to psychological powerlessness, a belief that we're worthless. When God showed up on earth in the person of Jesus Christ, He spent time with and forgave all sorts of notorious sinners. You can never be too sinful to begin or renew a relationship with Him or be part of His family, the church.

The Bible says that we are made in "the image of God." In part, that phrase means that in spite of the effects of sin on our characters and actions, God has imparted something of His life and identity to us. To be human is to be something very special in the eyes of God, whatever our faults.

"If I ever came to your church," a man once told me, "the roof would fall in." "I tell you what," I told him. "I'll wear a hard hat and we'll see what happens."

If the roof doesn't fall in when I go to worship, it won't do it when anybody else shows up. The Bible says that, "All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." So the church is the place--more exactly, the church is the fellowship of people--where we're reminded both of our need of forgiveness and of our access to it through Jesus Christ.

The question isn't whether you're good enough for God. None of us is, yet God wants us anyway!

The real question is whether we're honest enough to admit our need of God and open enough to let Him forgive us and be the most important Person in our lives.

Sincerely,
Mark

Letters to My Non-Churchgoing Friends (#8: Disappointed with the Church?)

[I'm writing a series of columns for the Community Press newspapers dealing with common reasons people give for not being part of the church. This is the eighth such letter.]

Dear Friend:
I've been talking about common reasons people offer for not being part of the church. Today, I want to deal with a reason often given by those who leave churches and don't come back. "I was disappointed by the church," they say.

Whether their disappointment in a previous congregation stems from unethical practices, feelings of being ignored or marginalized, or from being hurt by someone in congregational leadership, I feel badly when people are disappointed. I listen to them sympathetically. No one wants to be hurt, especially by the church. All churches should be fellowships of safety and welcome.

Having been disappointed by the church myself, I try to remind these hurting people of two things: (1) No church is perfect. Because, as I've pointed out before, the church is a fellowship of recovering sinners, there will be times when we disappoint one another. (2) Not all churches are the same. For every congregation in which the penchant for hurting others is endemic, you can find dozens whose members strive to live in Christian attitudes of love for God and neighbor.

But it should also be said that some people become disappointed with a church not because of a church's sins, but because of their own. They want the church to bend to their wills on matters of personal preference.

For example, I know of a church that lost several member families in a dispute over the color of new carpeting in the sanctuary. They wanted red and the building committee voted for salmon. "I was very hurt," said one of the departing members, which was really her way of saying, "I was ticked off that we didn't get our way!"

In recent years, homosexuality and other sexual expressions outside of marriage have become more accepted in our culture. I'm frankly glad that longstanding forms of homophobia are dying. Any time we think of people in dehumanizing terms, God isn't glorified.

But with this trend toward acceptance of more and diverse sexual expression, many profess disappointment that most Christian churches continue to say that the practice of homosexuality is contrary to God's will. Most churches welcome all people to wrestle with their sin and hear the Good News of forgiveness offered through Jesus Christ. That includes people who profess an orientation to homosexuality.

But churches aren't free to change God's mind on this subject. God has said that sexual intimacy is to happen within the bounds of heterosexual marriage. The Church--my own "liberal" Evangelical Lutheran Church in America included--has refused to alter what God has revealed in the Bible.

Jesus says that sin isn't just about what we do or say, but also about what we think. And the Bible tells us that all have sinned. From this, we can extrapolate that no one is guiltless in sexual matters. But if your disappointment with a church stems from its unwillingness to label right what God has called wrong, chances are you'll be disappointed for a long time.

Whatever the source of your disappointment with a church of which you may have been a part in the past, I hope that you won't let it keep you from finding a church home. There's no such thing as the perfect church. But when you find a church disappointing you, I hope you'll ask yourself this question: "Am I disappointed because God's will has been violated or is it because my will has been denied?"

And, even if you find the church guilty, ask yet another question of yourself: "Should I leave this church or can I stay, keep loving these imperfect people, and pray that they will keep loving me in spite of my own imperfections?"

Sincerely,
Mark

[To see all eight letters thus far written, go here. There will be more installments in this series.]

'Letters to My Non-Churchgoing Friends'

Here's a link to a series of columns I wrote for a suburban Cincinnati newspaper years ago. They're letters from this former atheist, now Christian, to non-churchgoing folks about why they might want to consider becoming part of God's family, the Church.

Letters to My Non-Churchgoing Friends

I wrote this series of "letters" for a newspaper that carried my column in the Cincinnati area when we lived there. I hope that these too, will be found helpful and maybe spur some good, respectful dialogue between Christians and non-Christians:

Letter #1 ("I don't need the church to be a Christian")
Letter #2 ("Worship is boring")
Letter #3 ("The church is full of hypocrites")
Letter #4 ("The church only wants my money")
Letter #5 ("I'm not good enough to be in church")
Letter #6 (Finding Community, Meeting God)
Letter #7 (Why can't I find a church that believes what I believe?)
Letter #8 ("I was disappointed by the church")
Letter #9 ("I can't get my spouse interested in church")
Letter #10 ("What is sin anyway?")
Letter #11 ("What is justification?")

'Letters to My Non-Churchgoing Friends': Links to All 11 Installments

Here is a link to all eleven installments of a series I hope that people will find helpful. Each post is written in the form of a letter, each one respectful I hope, to those who, for whatever reason, have chosen not to be part of a church.