In his 1978 book, Small Faith – Great God, N.T. Wright notes that many Christians desire a perfect church, but in doing so, put their faith in the wrong place:

You see [walking by sight] in many people’s attitude to the church. I don’t find in the New Testament any suggestion that the visible church ought to be composed of guaranteed one-hundred-per-cent soundly converted keen Christians. If it had been, half of the epistles would not have been necessary. Yet people are always hankering after a false security, such as you would get from belonging to a church that could be seen to be all right, seen to be ‘sound’…seen? We walk by faith, not by sight. Any attempt to get a purer church, or Christian life, than we have been promised this side of heaven, runs the risk of attempting to base security, assurance of salvation, on something other than the free grace and love of God (104).

We walk by faith, not by sight. That is important to remember as we navigate the mess and confusion that so often characterises the church.