When my dad was asked to join the church by the minister, he told him that he didn’t want to as the church was filled with so many hypocrites. The minister looked him in the eye and said, “There’s always room for one more, Neil.” With that my father joined the church. The church is full of people who aren’t always true to reflecting the love of God to the world. It is a problem.

I worked with a friend who had given up on church attendance. He had been a missionary in a desperately poor country. When he returned he went into reverse culture shock. He said it was like stepping off of the planet for three years and then jumping back on. He didn’t know how to adjust and his church didn’t help. They had sent them, greeted them when they returned and went on with life as if these people had never been away. No one asked him how he was doing and no one asked he and his family around and no one prayed with them at all. He was offended and no longer going to trust himself to an organization like that again. I did confront him on the fact that he kept saying He loved Jesus but didn’t want anything to do with His church. I told him that he couldn’t truly love Jesus if he didn’t want to have anything to do with the church for the church, unfortunately, is His body. If you don’t love His body how can you love Him?

The Body of Christ is far more than the organization that meets on Sundays in buildings with spires, sound systems and songs on the wall. It is those who name the name of Jesus as their Lord and Saviour and fellowship together. Two hands coming together; one, confession of His lordship, and two, meeting with other believers. It’s a problem when you forsake the other believers. Despite their hypocrisy they are part of Him and He’s coming back for us all.

The root of hypocrisy is planted in the soil of Adam’s sin and his inheritance to us of his nature. When he sinned, he and Eve knew they were naked, exposed, so they covered up and hid. The immediate consequence of sin was self-preservation. That is further confirmed by Adam’s accusation that it was Eve’s fault and ultimately God’s for giving him such a wife. Ever since the time of Adam’s sin mankind has been protecting self from harm. They try to appease evil spirits from bringing bad fortune or poor crops. They have even developed a bill of human rights to protect themselves from each other.

We are afraid, afraid of death, afraid of pain, afraid of each other. The knowledge of good and evil made us the victim of its consequences. We can only overcome this through receiving what Jesus did for us. When we believe in faith, we are manifesting trust in God to cover us, protect us and provide for us. But we wobble along the way. We have faith at the time of salvation but we grow in faith through revelation of whom the Father is and how much He loves us.

The problem with the church is the presence of renewed fallen people in the gatherings. We are saved, we are being saved and we will be saved. Our sins are forgiven, they will be forgiven if we sin too but we are still capable of relying on our sin nature and acting out of it.

I think the greatest failing of the western church is our inability to forgive. We have all these high expectations for the church, and then people hurt us. They are just like us, but we leave mad. We are supposed to be able to forgive and move on without living in distrust and holding long accounts against others. I know that people have offended me, but I know that they have grown in the Lord too. If I have grown, they have. Sometimes it is like the reaction we have when we haven’t seen people in years and then we meet them again. We have held them in an image of what they looked like then. My, look how you’ve grown! Or, my god, look how old he is? These are all comments that come to mind. People change in the physical and if they love Jesus, they will change in the spirit too.

So for the church to be the light of Christ to the world we need to start acting like Him. When He hung on the cross, He said Father forgive them for they know not what they do. Today, people still don’t know what they are doing. Yes, it may feel like they are crucifying you but we need to forgive. We need to put down our shield of self-protection and accept the possibility that we might be wrong or part of the conflict. My reaction to a wrong can compound the effects even if I wasn’t the initiator.

The world is waiting for us to love one another. All the worship evangelism, prophetic evangelism and mass evangelism isn’t going to have much effect if we don’t love each other. Dang, that’s going to hurt.