“You aren’t going to find a perfect church, and even if you did, as soon as you joined it, it wouldn’t be perfect anymore.” Have you ever been told this by someone? If you haven’t, it may be an indication that you are the type of person that says this to others. If you have, how did you feel? I can tell you how I feel every time someone says that. If we map this on the the pictorial here, I would put that statement on one ‘shoulder’ and perhaps the ditch on the other side would be something like this. So, although maybe that statement isn’t so bad, it seems that the mentality would take one off the path and into ‘nothing matters’ as opposed to the opposite extreme of ‘everything matters.’
Admittedly, I cringe when people have said this in conversations that I’ve been part of. Maybe they say so with the best of intentions (I doubt it, though), as it is quite effective at ending the topic at hand. What is most likely the real meaning is that the person expressing this statement supports upholding the status quo, even if the status quo is below God’s perfect desire for his followers and Church, but is to ashamed or unsophisticated to say so.
Should every topic receive equal airtime? Should any topic be shut down, nipped in the bud? Here’s another theory that seems relevant. Our church has been discussing some topics around how closely we should walk together with our own, let’s call it, identity. The theory (yes, my own): every issue or decision, though it might start out as either a total spiritual issue or a completely cultural one, move from being one to the other as some intermediate positions move toward “out of bounds”. The challenge in classifying issues as either spiritual or cultural is the false assumption that spiritual issues are on the Y axis and cultural issues are on the X axis, so to speak. I argue, not so. Our model here would necessitate one extreme to be “this issue is only spiritual” and the other extreme to be “this issue is only cultural” with peak performance being totally spiritual and totally cultural.
I recently sent some friends the following picture and asked them, could the church object? Upon what grounds?
How about these?
In conclusion, don’t be the person that says that colloquial nonsense about ‘no perfect church….’ Don’t get stuck thinking an issue is ‘just’ a spiritual issue or just cultural. Thankfully, the silly statement, ‘that’s not a salvation issue’ has been thrown in the American evangelical trash bin some years back, hopefully to never resurface! Let’s throw this statement in the same trash bin and actually have real dialogue about how to strengthen the Church of God and its witness to the world.