What do you do when the community of faith is not what you thought it was?

It happens to all of us. Maybe the once pleasant and amiable community enters a time of discord or disagreement. Such argument or controversy would never happen here, you previously told yourself…until it does, tainting your experience of the church. Or maybe years of familiarity have made you aware that those filling the pews every Sunday are not the perfect Christians they sometimes pretend to be. These realizations can be hard to experience. As someone I know once quipped, “I feel like the church is destroying my faith.”

So, what do you do? Do you forsake the church altogether, telling yourself that you can be closer to Jesus in isolation rather than surrounded by such a messy bunch of hypocrites? Do you jettison the problematic community in search for one closer to perfection? Neither of these suggestions solve the messiness of the church. Either you are left devoid of a faith community altogether, or you bounce from community to community whenever the church inevitably shows its human face. 

But what if the messiness of the community is an opportunity for you to act like Jesus? Have you ever considered how Jesus experienced the community of faith? Jesus, who experienced perfect communal love within the Trinity, witnessed the community in all its inglorious humanity.  In the temple Jesus saw people fighting with one another, people jockeying for position or authority. He walked the halls of a temple that prioritizing riches over prayerfulness or ministry. And the worship? He who heard the praises of angelic choirs now listened to the off-key chanting of human voices. How jarring that must have been!

And what of his walk with the disciples? That was no better. Two disciples were so concerned with personal greatness they attempted to trick Jesus into securing them heavenly honor; others frequently responded to situations out of anger or fear; one disciple makes a habit of jumping to conclusions regardless of the consequences; and then there is the one who spends his entire discipleship working against Jesus, eventually selling his discipleship for 30 pieces of silver. 

But despite all of this, Jesus never gave up on the community. Time after time Jesus found himself in the temple, and as flawed as the disciples were, Jesus continued to walk with them. The fact is, the only person who could rightly say he did not need anyone else to live the faithful life, never stepped out on his own. As ludicrous, backward, or sinful as the faith community could be from time to time, Jesus never discarded it or swapped his flawed disciples out for a more perfect lot.

We are never made to live our spiritual lives alone. Following Jesus means joining in other people’s messy following. The messiness of the community, therefore, is the very place upon which Jesus shines his grace. The love of Jesus forms us, reforms us, forgives us, and heals us, not because we are the perfect community but precisely because we are a community that sometimes inhabits the very things we preach against. And yet, with faithful audacity, we claim that Jesus is present.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer once wrote that to be the church we must cast aside the “wish-dream” of the church. Overly romanticizing what the church should be like (or what the church was like in some bygone age), distracts us from the real-life community that Jesus calls us into. Maybe, the messiness of the community is not a problem to solve, but an opportunity to seize. What if the church’s messiness is an opportunity to let the mind in us be the same as that which was in Christ Jesus. Could the messiness of our faith community be a call for us to act like Jesus, to exhibit the blessings of the Spirit, to purvey his holy grace?

This is what Jesus did. When the disciples showed their ugly face, Jesus revealed his divine one. He met bitterness with blessing, mean-spiritedness with mercy, grumbling with grace.  The messiness of the disciples became for Jesus the opportunity for him to display his love in both word and deed. When we only focus on the messiness of the community, we never recognise the opportunity to live like Jesus. If we could accept the church when it fails to incarnate the fullness of faith, then we would know that we are just as accepted even when our frailty shows.