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I’ll Stop Church-Bashing When the Church Stops Bashing…

I’m a Christian and a pastor, and I’ve grown weary of Church-bashing. 

I wish the Church would stop bashing the LGBTQ community. It’s not enough for preachers, evangelists and pew sitters to condemn, vilify, and ostracize gay people anymore. No longer satisfied in simply removing them from their faith communities, they now seem compelled to strip those who identify as LGBTQ of the basic rights and dignities this country affords all its citizens.

I wish the Church would stop bashing the Muslim Community. The irresponsible, politicized religious fervor that paints all those who practice Islam as dangerous, would-be terrorists, is being generated almost solely by professed Christian leaders. It is responsible for discrimination and violence against peace-loving Muslims in America, and cultivating unmerited resentment toward an entire community based solely on their differing religious convictions.

I wish the Church would stop bashing people of color. Black lives matter. Black deaths matter. The longer Christians dig in their heels and refuse to say these words, the longer we justify violence against young black men, the more we suggest that demanding equality is somehow subversive—the more we testify to the systematic racism saturating the Church and the individual hearts of so many white Christians. We can’t hate people because of the color of their skin, and be Christlike at the same time.

I wish the Church would stop bashing women. Whether for pursuing roles as leaders in the Church or for wearing the clothing they feel comfortable wearing or for breastfeeding their kids or for desiring to have control over their own bodies, organized Christianity still doesn’t understand how to treat women with the dignity and equality they deserve. The Church desperately needs to embrace and celebrate its feminine side.

I wish the Church would stop bashing those who don’t believe in God. Facing dwindling church membership, too many Christian leaders seem burdened to double-down on the war rhetoric of the insidious, evil culture beyond the church campus, in order to stoke the fires of urgency in the shrinking faithful. Such caricatures paint Atheists and Agnostics as less moral or less decent or less loving—and this simply isn’t true.

I wish the Church would stop bashing people for exercising freedom. Whether for not pledging allegiance to the flag or for protesting the shootings of black men by police or for displaying outrage at the gun violence in our streets or for demanding marriage for everyone, American Christians need to learn that freedom isn’t confined only to expressions that match their conclusions. People aren’t anti-American, unGodly, or wrong, simply because we don’t agree with them.

I wish the Church would stop bashing Democrats. The lazy stereotype that imagines Jesus to be the sole property of the Republican Party is one of the most unproductive we’ve produced in the past few decades. It is denying the God present in all people, it is nurturing division in our country, and it is invalidating the spirituality of millions of people who don’t identify as G.O.P, but still fully believe in G.O.D.

I wish the Church would stop bashing “The World”. It’s so easy to label people; to categorize them based on the way they look or talk or pray, whether they drink or cuss or have tattoos. Somewhere along the line we made Christianity about producing some tidy, holy homogeneity instead of embracing the stunning diversity of humanity. Maybe those rough edges, colorful vernaculars, and bold expressions are God itself, and they make the Church better and more beautiful.

The Church is not a building. It’s the corporate expression of followers of Jesus in the world, and right now this shared testimony appears to be doing far more damage than good out there.

We can’t claim a love for all people, while holding disregard or absolute contempt for so many of those people.

It isn’t Church-bashing to call the Church and the Christians who comprise it, to give the world a far better, more loving, more decent, more Jesus like reflection than it is.

The people of God need to be the people with the most tender hearts, the biggest tables, and the widest arms.

Church, let’s start loving.

Let’s stop bashing.

 

 

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