The Biblical Articles: A Rebuttal of the Case Against the Church

People who "pan" the church need first to be told that their indictment is usually not severe enough! Those who love the church and live within it can offer a much stiffer condemnation than the outsider. As they know it better, they see its wretchedness better -- but they also see its potential greatness better. And often this fact keeps them within the church, rather than going outside and throwing stones at the windows.

See how it works. The outside "critic" is doing some slippery thinking. When confronted by obvious weaknesses in American democracy, he does not say: "Democracy is rotten. Look at the graft and corruption. The whole thing's a mess. I won't even bother to vote." No, he says: "Democracy ought to be better than this. Let's get good candidates into office, so that democracy will work." The constructive critic on the inside is more realistic than the destructive critic on the outside. If this is true in terms of democracy, it is also true in terms of the church.

But . . .At one point, the analogy fails. It needs to be clear that the church is not just a voluntary association of good, earnest people who get together to form a club for raising the standards of community morality. The church is rather something that came into being because ordinary people found themselves in the midst of an experience of community quite different from anything they had ever experienced before, something that was not their doing at all, but something that proceeded from the power and love of God, as it was made known to them through Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit.

These people responded to God's outgoing love and recognized that this community (that is, the church) was God's doing and not theirs.The critics need to remember that they often criticize the church as it is, by comparing it with the church as it ought to be. This is really a left-handed compliment. To say, "The church stands for racial equality but doesn't practice it," is an admission that the church's principle is right, and that only the practice is wrong. The inference is clear. People who believe in racial equality should work within the church to make practice conform more nearly to principle. They will find people within who are just as disturbed about the disparity and who are working hard to try to remove it.