I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the church.  Not my church or any other particular church, but “The Church” as a whole.  For months, I’ve been wrestling with how and why God chose us fallible people to be His representatives on this earth, Christ’s ambassadors – who sometimes love people well and other times, fail terribly.  The flood of millennials walking away from “organized religion” reflects a current response towards the failure of the church, but man’s inability to fully live out Christian character is not a new phenomenon.  We’ve all heard stories about someone terribly hurt “in the name of Christianity,” by someone or a church body that was obviously “doing it wrong.”

Somehow, I’m humbled by God’s willingness to allow us to spread His word and be His witness.  I feel like I’m peeking into a crack in the door to His throne room, that somehow I’m getting a tiny glimpse of His humility and patience.  Just like Jesus on the cross, willing to be mocked and ridiculed, misunderstood and unappreciated, God has chosen to let us represent Him at sure risk of mischaracterization.

It’s easy for me to see certain flaws in this or that church or a certain Christian approach.  Just recently, though, I realized that while striving for a mature and healthy church is vitally important, it’s not just a matter of fixing the flaws.  It’s becoming more clear to me that no single person or church can ever fully represent God, because He is infinite, multidimensional, able to be wholly loving, wholly true, completely merciful, completely just, fully powerful and fully gentle, all at the same time – unlike us, who by nature are not infinite and so are only capable of expressing part of God.  When Paul writes that some are hands and some are feet, that is a reality.  He’s not telling the foot to be not only a foot but also and a hand and a stomach and eyes and…  Only God can be All.  Even a church made up of diverse people is limited in the expression of God.  Which, even as I struggle to understand this, awes me with a deeper realization of how beyond me, beyond all of us, is God.

Our very limitations and weakness reveal his glory.

But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. 2 Corinthians 4:7