Let’s Get Real

            Again and again I hear that the one attribute most attractive to people in this day and age we call “postmodernity” is authenticity. What is authenticity, you ask? I’m glad you asked! Other words I would use to explain it would be honesty, openness, genuineness, transparency, and we could use several others. In short, it means to be real.

            Being real isn’t always easy. For most humans it is often a struggle, we feel safer behind a façade, trying to portray what we feel we should be rather than what we truly are. Unfortunately I’ve observed that one of the hardest places for us to be real with each other is in the church. We too often are affected by our perception that the church is to be the gathering of saints, so we better be saintly. Somehow we’ve come to think that in order to be accepted we need to have it all together, that we must always be on top of the world, and that we must hide our struggles and failures from one another.

            The problem is, when we hold onto this perception, it actually keeps us from being the church as God intends us to be. God intends his church to be a gathering of people who have admitted that we can’t make it on our own; that we need God’s grace to live the life God intends for us; that we need the support of one another to receive healing, become whole, stay strong and to stay on the right path.

            Philip Yancey, in The Church: Why Bother? notes that Alcoholics Anonymous meets needs of struggling people in a way that the church has not. He shares the powerful answer an alcoholic friend gave him when he asked what one quality was missing in the local church that AA had somehow provided him. His one-word answer: dependency. He went on to explain:

“None of us can make it on our own – isn’t that why Jesus came? Yet most church people give off a self-satisfied air of piety or superiority. I don’t sense them consciously leaning on God or on each other. Their lives appear to be in order. An alcoholic who goes to church feels inferior and incomplete… It’s a funny thing, what I hate most about my life, my alcoholism, was the one thing God used to bring me back to him. Because of it, I know I can’t survive without God… Maybe God is calling us alcoholics to teach the saints what it means to be dependent on him and on his community on earth.”[1]

            Can we learn a lesson from Yancey’s friend? Are we able to be the church God wants us to be while still keeping up our facades? Can we grow together into what God wants us to be, as individuals and as his church, without being real with one another? Let’s get out of our own way and open up with each other, being honest about our struggles, encouraging and sharing God’s grace with one another, and becoming the community of healing he has called us to be.

            May God enable us to be real about the strengths and the weaknesses of our church and of ourselves as individuals so we can move towards God’s desired future for us together!

Pastor Carl