The church has become a place of institutional lies where people feel the need to hide who they are and what they are like in order to be accepted within the culture. I don't think this is what Jesus had in mind

Comments

[Barefootmeg]

I think you're over generalizing a bit. You could say, "Much of the church" or "Many churches" or even "Common church culture within America" but just going with "The church" seems a bit over reaching.

There ARE lies within the church. But they're not all lies that make us act differently than we would otherwise act. One thing I love about the church we're currently knitted into is that everybody just plain is who they are. What you see is what you get. No one is wearing a mask.

But I suspect we still have other types of lies in our church. Lies like, "the Westminster Confession" is a nearly infallible guide for faith and practice. (They won't admit that it's infallible, but you pretty much have to assent to it all to be in leadership so what does that tell you?)

Or perhaps the bigger lie is our sense of comfort for where we're at or our discouragement about not being able to move beyond where we're at.

I think a lot of the lies within the church stem from being steeped so deeply in our culture (specifically the American culture in our cases) that we can't even see where that culture is in opposition to God's reality.

[Ike]

It's ironic that the One
Who forgave the woman caught in adultery,
Who ate with tax collectors and sinners,
Who offered the fullness of Holy Spirit to a woman with with a heretical theology and questionable living situation,
Who told His followers to forgive "seventy times seven"
would have churches named for Him where people cannot be themselves for fear of rejection.