A few years ago, I was hurt by the church. The kind of pain like when you wake up with an immense sinus infection, having had a head ache for weeks but blaming it on allergies or a cold. At some point I began to realize that my church was not perfect and that it was full of people in all of their mistakes and sinful ways of doing things. And it hurt. I was betrayed by the nasty underbelly of the church that I grew up in. I found myself surrounded with practices that I had just written off as not a big deal, or thinking that God would convict the pastor of his wrong doings in time. But as the church went though a financial strain, I began to see how the leadership's lack of trust in God played out in manipulating the congregation for more money, pouring guilt over those who volunteered, and firing any leaders who disagreed with the "vision" of where the church was going. And I found myself angry with the church.
So I asked God to explain this insanity to me, and this is what he said.
First of all, God is not the church. The church is the bride of Christ. We often find it difficult to separate the two. We think that when the church is greedy, God is greedy. When the church is unloving, God is unloving. When the church is full of anger and condemnation, God is full of anger and condemnation. But God is none of those things. God is divine. The church is divinely called. The church is given into the hands of men and women to manage. And sometimes, the managers don't step in line with the intention that God has for the church, or the character of who God is.
This is what the Lord told me next.
This is the story of Hosea, who was a prophet who loved the Lord deeply. One day, the Lord told him to go and marry a woman from the temple who was a prostitute. Keep in mind that in those days, to marry meant to give your virginity to your husband. And a man would not marry a woman who was not a virgin. Women could not have a job, so unless they had a husband to take care of them, their choice was to be a prostitute or beg for money. For Hosea to marry a prostitute would have been unheard of. But, despite it being a vastly unpopular thing to do in that time, Hosea listened to the Lord and went and married a prostitute named Gomar, who bore him a son. And Hosea loved Gomar with an undying affection that (I can only imagine) Gomar felt unworthy of. Here she was, with a husband who chose to pursue her when she was by all cultural definitions, unworthy of love. Not only that, but she had a child to carry on her lineage. And yet, time and time again Gomar left Hosea and her family and went back to the temple to sell her body.
Why? Why would Gomar go back to the temple again and again? Why would she trade a life of joy and affection for an empty life of selling her body? The answer is this. Gomar was called into something bigger than herself. Something bigger than her sense of worth. Even bigger than her culture's view of her worth. But Gomar was still living in the identity of someone who deserves to live as a prostitute, as someone not worthy of a husband and family.
This is the story of the church.
The Lord is called to love his church, and to bring her into her worth as the bride of Christ, who is to birth his presence into the world. But sometimes the church gets caught up in the identity that it finds in the world. We get stuck thinking that the Church is only valuable if it fits into the world's worth system. And it gets stuck in living in the fear of the world knowing who we really are and what we're really worth. All because we, as a church body, are afraid that God will see us for what we really are and tell us to go back to the life we lived before. Here's the deal... the Lord is not fooled by our attempts to cover our identity. He know who we are. He know who we have been, and he calls us to step into a new identity as his bride. And he will never ask us to go back to the temple, because we are called into his family.
So here is where I landed on all of this.
The church sometimes acts like a whore. It will go through stages of mistrust in the Lord, and it will be brought back to the temple again and again. And when you forget that the church is not Christ himself, but the bride of Christ, you can make the all-too-common mistake of thinking that God is causing hurt and pain, when it is in fact the church that has caused you the pain that you are feeling.
The second thing I learned is that Christ will always pursue his bride. He will go back to the temple again and again and snatch up his wife whom he adores, no matter if she just slept with greed, fear, unkindness, anger or any other. And he will remind her of her identity, no matter how much she cheats on him. He will remind her of her worth in him, and not of her worth in her culture. The hardest part of this is coming to the realization that if Christ loves his bride, despite her acting like a whore, we must then choose to love her too.
This last point is the most important point of all.
First of all, if you have been hurt by the church, it is vital that you bring your grievances to the Lord. Remember that he is the loving husband who always brings his wife home. And if he cares so deeply for a group of people, how much more deeply does he care for you? The Lord desires to heal your hurts so that they do not come back up with every church that you visit. His heart longs to see healing in your life. And he wants you to adore his wife in the same way that he does! So if you find yourself identifying closely with this paragraph, pray that the Lord will give you his heart for his bride.
Secondly, I want to remind you that all churches will go back to the temple, and the Lord will go after them to bring them home. But not all church bodies allow the Lord to bring them back. There are churches that refuse to be brought home from the temple. The church is a place where you find peace, rest and joy. And that comes in trusting the Lord fully. When a church chooses not to trust the Lord, their identity is not being shaped by who the Lord says that they are, but who the world says they are. If you find yourself in a church that finds identity in the world, and does not allow the Lord to speak identity over it, you are no longer obligated to that church.
So here is a statement directly intended for those of you who find yourselves in a church like that. I believe that the Lord gives us spiritual authority, so in the name of Jesus I release you from the obligation to stay in that church community. The Lord has better things for you now. And if you just got chills reading that, this message is for you. You were waiting patiently in pain and agony, hoping to hear the Lord's direction. Well this is it. The Lord will bring his bride back, but he will not force her to live in his house.
So here's the summery. The Church is not Christ, she is the bride of Christ. Sometimes the Church is a whore, but the Lord pursues her and always strives to bring her into the identity that he calls her to. When we are hurt by the church, we must pray that the Lord gives us his affection for his bride. And lastly, if you are in a church that refuses to come home to the loving- identity building arms of Christ, you have no obligation to stay there.
