Jesus' Bride -- quotes and thoughts by Mark Lauterbach

I have no doubt that one cannot despise the local church without despising the Savior.  yes, the temptation is real.  Churches are painful places.  Pastors fail in character.  Members fight with each other.  There are power plays and cover-ups.  We expect community in Christ and encounter potlucks and committees. I am helped by realizing that this was everything the apostles faced and yet they continued to love the local church. 

I am helped by seeing that most of my criticism of the church is self-righteous -- I am all the problems described.  No one would take an honest look at my life and say, "Now there is a real example of the transforming power of the Gospel."  They would see grace and sin all over.  Just like the church.
I have seen the best and the worst -- lived through days of experiencing remakrable care and love -- lived through a church psplit that we made into a plant -- seen remarkable acts of humility -- seen remarkable self-serving. 
I still love the church for the joy of being part of Jesus "travail" and looking to the day when we shall be perfected.  My sanctification has as much to do with my charitable judgments to others and forbearance with their weakness as it does with victorious community in Christ.

Over the years I have collected some quotes that I find helpful.  I am including these below.

A pastor should not complain about his congregation, certainly never to other people, but also not to God. A congregation has not been entrusted to him in order that he should become its accuser before God and men. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Ordinary congregations are God's choice for the form the church takes in locale, and pastors are the persons assigned to them for ministry. St. Paul talked about the foolishness of preaching; I would like to carry on about the foolishness of congregation. Of all the ways in which to engage in the enterprise of church, this has to be the most absurd--this haphazard collection of people who somehow get assembled into pews on Sundays, half-heartedly sing a few songs most of them don't like, tune in and out of a sermon according to the state of their digestion and the preacher's decibels, awkward in their commitments and jerky in their prayers. . . .But the people in these pews are also people who suffer deeply and find God in their suffering. These are men and women who make love commitments, are faithful to them through trial and temptation, and bear fruits of righteousness, spirit-fruits that bless the people around them. -- Eugene Peterson

All your dissatisfactions with the Church seem to me to come from an incomplete understanding of sin . . . What you seem to demand is that the Church put the kingdom of heaven on earth right now and here – that the Holy Ghost be translated at once into all flesh. The Holy Spirit rarely shows Himself on the surface of anything. To have the Church be what you want it to be would require the continuous miraculous meddling of God in affairs, whereas it is to retain our dignity that God has chose to operate in another manner. We can’t reject that without rejecting life . . . Christianity makes a difference; but it cannot kill the age. -- Flannery O-Connor

This is a post by Mark Lauterbach of Grace Church San Diego.