The Gift of the Flawed Church

As I've continued reading the book Best Advice, with advice for ministers by well-regarded pastors and seminary professors, I've found another insight that I have been considering.

James C. Howell, a Methodist pastor in North Carolina, offers a short essay filled with plenty of practical advice for ministers.  At the end, he briefly confronts an issue that any pastor who reads much about the church will encounter frequently -- the church is broken.  Rare is the book about some aspect of church leadership that does not directly confront multiple problems that the church faces in this time.

If ministers are not careful -- and all too often we are not careful -- we can shape our pastoral efforts to counter these problems, with little appreciation of what may be right in our congregations.  Howell offers an important corrective to such thinking by suggesting that there is a Spiritual gift, if not a theological necessity, for some of the perceived flaws in the church.

He writes:

The failure of faith, I have come to believe, is little understood.  People trash the church for being a silly shell of what it ought to be, but it is the flawedness of the church that leaves room for an incarnate Lord to meet silly shells of people who aren't who they ought to be. People feel a hollowness in their souls and wish the preacher could fill the tank with clever words, but the hollowness was placed there by a God who wants to be sought, not found.
-- James C. Howell, "Don't Take My Advice," Best Advice: Wisdom on Ministry from 30 Leading Pastors and Preachers, pp. 73-74

What an interesting way to approach the shortcomings of a church!  To be sure, the church is full of problems because the church is full of people (to borrow a saying that floats around church leadership circles).  But what if it isn't only our hypocrisy that holds us back as Christians?  What if the church can never fully meet our spiritual needs because no church can fully represent the living God?

More than this, I believe there is a deep appreciation of the incarnate Christ here, of God who becomes flesh not out of His necessity, but rather to meet our shortcomings.  If so, then the church, when we live up to Paul's claim for us as part of the body of Christ, needs be imperfect in order to reach out to other imperfect people.  This does not defend every flaw in our congregations (of which there are some with no defense), but to remind us that not everything broken needs fixing to be useful to God.