Earlier this week, I wrote about the need for an ontological understanding of the church, one that views the church for what it is, not for what it does. I mentioned a number of problems that arise from a functional understanding of the church. But there is an additional problem worth noting. When we attempt to define or measure the church functionally, we try our best to disguise the fact that all the people in the church are still sinners.

Naturally, we don't altogether mask this – you can't escape something as blatant as Romans 3:23 – but we make a concerted effort to downplay reality. What is that reality? It is simply that the church is a mess. We don't like the fact that nobody has it all together. We don't like it when we get hurt in church because church is supposed to be a place where everything is good and peaceful. We don't like the fact that living the Christian life is really, really difficult and so we (sometimes unconsciously) draw up a set of standards for what we think Christians should be like that make a lot of concessions to our culture because then it is easier to make it look like we have it all together, and as a bonus, outsiders will feel more welcome when they are among us. We want to justify the idea that 'Jesus makes everything better,' and we need to create that illusion in order to make it believable.

Needless to say, a lot of Christians don't want to be honest about the state of the church. I quoted a small portion of N.T. Wright's, Small Faith – Great God, the other day where he noted that Christians often want to walk by sight instead of by faith. We want the perfect church, and when we don't see it, we think we have failed. We then think we need to concede the fact that we are all a bunch of hypocrites, nevermind that most people just want us to be real and to stop creating a façade that masks who we really are. But because we want to avoid being honest, we respond in a number of different ways, as Eugene Peterson notes in Practice Resurrection:

A lot of [people] seem to have no idea what is going on. What they see is chaos: hostility, injury, brokenness, church fights, church sleaze, church grandstanding, religious wars. Many of them find a place in the bleachers with a few other likeminded people and make do with what they find there. They survive by ignoring what they find confusing and disorienting. They remove their attention from what is taking place on the field (in the congregation, in the denomination). They do pray together, study together, socialize together. Life in the bleachers isn't all that bad.

There are other people who are so disturbed by what they perceive as chaos on the playing field that they decide to 'do something about it.' They want a game that looks like a game, a church that looks like a church, where no one gets hurt and everything is orderly and stays in place. They understand church as something they need to take charge of. And of course, there are a great many people who just walk out and look for a game that they are already familiar with or go home and turn on the television where they can satisfy, if you can call it that, their religious needs by picking a brand without dealing personally with either God or people.

The point is that willful ignorance, creating alternative realities, or abandonment are not the answers to the mess we see when we look at the church. As Wright said in the short quote I posted the other day, we walk by faith. We are not going to get this right all on our own. Peterson again:

I don't think we have to make any apologies that church is not conspicuously prominent as a place of peace... The church in its deepest being, as it is in itself, the ontological church comprises a vast company of men and women in all stages of maturity: crawling infants and squalling babies, awkward and inpulsive adolescents, harassed and fatigued parents, and occasional holy men and holy women who have it all together. All of us who understand and practice peace in the company of Jesus, who is our peace, have a lot of maturing to do. About the time we are becoming mature (if we ever do), we find that we have brought another generation into the world that has to go through the whole process once again. Humankind does not mature all at once. And so peace is constantly in the making, and also constantly at risk.

...When anyone looks at church as a performance, whether from inside our outside, mostly what they see is skinned knees and sprained ankles, awkward, bungled attempts at keeping the peace. But we also know that at the source and center of church, Jesus is our peace. And so we don't quit.

Jesus is our peace. When we try to 'fix' the church with our own solutions or try to cover up who we really are, we hurt ourselves, we cease to bear witness to the transforming power of the gospel, and we block the way for true peace in our churches. Being honest about who we are and putting our faith in Jesus, embracing the new life we have in him, is the first step we need to take. True peace comes only through Jesus, the source and life of the church.