hope and despair

this afternoon I got an email from a friend, and he sent me a short paper that laid out where he was in thinking about life and the church. I'm afraid it held a bit more despair than I was really expecting. I mean, I knew that's where he was, but it still made me sad to see him verbalize it that strongly.

Basically, I think so much of his disappointment comes from the way that the supposed body of Christ in the world, the church, fails to look anything at all look like the Jesus it claims to follow. Honestly, I think he (and I, and every sane person I know) has had a problem with that for a long time. I think the feeling intensified though, the more he was around two groups of people. The first was people that have been hurt by that attitude, and sent away from Jesus because of the foolishness of his followers. I mean, how many conversations can a person have that go "Yeah, I'm curious about Jesus, but frankly, Christians are jerks" before losing some hope that things can be different in the world. Secondly, I think he the people he was around who claimed the name of Christ just really didn't care that anything was wrong, or even see anything wrong with the church. That's a big fat problem. See, the church is majorly sick, all over the place. But it seems like most people don't feel that way at all, or don't care. I think that's because they judge churches based on the wrong criteria...How happy people there are, how successful people there are, how many show up for worship, do people participate in the worship, if they're "reaching the community" and such things as these. Nobody says, "well, our church doesn't seem to be doing very well at being like Jesus." or even, "Yeah, I'm a part of a neat church, and I think the people there are helping me be more like Jesus." When's the last time you heard something like that when people talked about churches? I don't know if I ever have, and I work in a church, one I really like! It's not that its an evil place, but sometimes I really wonder if we could throw out everything in the gospels and our church would still operate in exactly the same ways. I think that's bad. I wish that I felt like if all of sudden somebody took away the gospels then the church would collapse. But I'm just not sure that's the case. How the heck do we get there?