The Business of the Church

We all want Jesus to come alongside us and improve us, our marriages, our children. We want to go to sleep at night confident that we have taken several steps forward, getting a little better every day. We want to reach the end of our lives and see that we have accomplished something of lasting significance and worth, to know that we were worth something. In all of these scenarios, however, Jesus is a means to an end (a very personal, therapeutic end: feeling better about ourselves). As one new acquaintance said at dinner last night, the problem isn’t that we need to align our hopes and dreams with Jesus; it’s that Jesus upends our hopes and dreams, intruding into our lives with such force that what we thought was important actually dies and new life is born in its place. As the great Episcopal preacher Robert Farrar Capon puts it, “Jesus came to raise the dead. He did not come to teach the teachable; He did not come to improve the improvable; He did not come to reform the reformable. None of those things work.” As long as the church thinks it is in the life business instead of the death business, it will constantly clamor after every tool to improve life and it will judge its success in the way that bookkeepers and accountants judge success.

via The Business of the Church – White Horse Inn Blog.