The church really, really shouldn’t work. It makes no sense. It is baffling. And if you don’t believe me, you haven’t been paying attention in church.

I think we take the ridiculous ineptitude of the church for granted. We go to church like we go through life. We assume that most people are a great deal like us, until we run smack up against someone who really isn’t–and there the explosion of personalities leaves one or both parties breathless and occasionally damaged. In order to avoid these situations we tend to flock together with people who are, well, a lot like us–people with similar tastes, interests, outlooks, lifestyles, etc. There is nothing particularly wrong with this until you come to church. The whole point of the church is to overcome differences in personality, background, and taste in our one common mind: Christ. A common mind that makes slave and free, male and female, Jew and Greek, old and young, rich and poor, tactful and brusque, with and without taste, scrapbookers and non-scrapbookers, all brothers and sisters under the loving father-ship of God.

Like any family (because the home is God’s picture of so many eternal truths), this family experiences loss, joy, malaise, exultation, surprise, etc. together. We are commanded to rejoice together and to sorrow together. When was the last time church did that? Just celebrated because God had done great things for someone in the congregation? Or broken out in spontaneous prayer for God to work or in thankfulness for God’s working on behalf of someone? As firmly as I believe in the traditions and rituals of church (I think we ignore them to our peril and slavish follow them to our destruction — more on that later), I am dismayed at how little spontaneity we generally embrace when it comes to prayer and praising.

Like all families there is friction. I mean, let’s face it, humanly speaking asking a church full of sinners to go about accomplishing good is the equivalent of herding cats. The friction is multiplied by the fact that we aren’t just commanded to go out and do good, we are also commanded to become good–to become more like our Father. We are commanded to encourage, exhort, rebuke, edify, teach, correct each other into more Christ-likeness; and we all know how much human beings love to be encouraged, exhorted, rebuked, edified, taught, and corrected into change of any kind!

Someone, and I wish I could remember who, said that drama is locking two people who disagree in a room and letting them fight. Multiply this by the number of members at your church and you have your church drama quotient. At least three times a week (and if we were more like the NT church that met together daily for prayer, even more) we put X number of people (who in the normal course of events would probably never connect) into a room and require them to be family.

The sad thing is that this rarely actually happen, especially if you are like me. I’m still like the person looking for birds of a feather. I find “my” people in church and generally stick with them. We make excuses for it in church–they sit on the piano/organ side (because clearly switching pews in church is impossible), they take off right after the service (because inviting people over to our homes is evidently just too much work), they are hard to talk to/don’t seem very open (no comment!). Biblically, I don’t think we have (cliché alert) a leg to stand on. We are being sinful. I am being sinful.

Until we repent and start treating the entire church (even the difficult people) like the family God intended it to be we will never begin to understand the most breath-taking truth about the church: It is, despite all of its deformity, “the manifold wisdom of God.” Ponder on that for a bit and if you are not re-convinced that God’s ways are not our ways and that God’s thoughts are not infinitely higher than our thoughts, go ponder it a little longer. Praise God that he uses the broken, weak, ridiculous things of the world to work out his own glorious purposes. Praise God and then go out and meet some of those broken, weak ridiculous things that sit on the piano/organ side. Get to know the family God has provided for you in the church.

“So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.” Eph 2:19-22