That's the perennial question. It haunts me. It flows from that famous quote from Gandhi: "I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. They are so unlike your Christ."
If the Church is the hope of the world (which I believe it is), then why does the world despise us so? The answer is simple: it's because we behave extremely unchristlike - and all the world can see is the "Bible in me."
So, Pat Robertson's embarrassing comment about "taking out" Venezuelan President Chavez only serves to confirm the world's worst fears about Christians: that we hate and want to control everyone who is not just like us.
When Christians sue their Christian employers for frivolous or imaginary faults, then sign "In Christ" at the bottom, it makes non-Christians hysterical about our blatant, self-serving hypocrisy.
When Christians act disgusted with people who sport multiple piercings and tattoos, instead of accepting and loving them as "pre-Christians", we ruin any opportunity for spiritual dialogue.
On the other hand, when someone like Ashley Smith talks down a murderer by sharing what she's been reading in "The Purpose Driven Life," all of heaven smiles.
But for the most part, it's so sad to realize that the Church, the bride of Christ, which Christ died to make beautiful, so often makes herself ugly with proud sneers and self-righteous blindness -- not noticing how we are harming the very cause we say we are living for.
I'm not without fault. At times I catch myself acting in an unchristlike manner. Self-loathing is sometimes appropriate. And the only solution is to seek the renovation of the heart through becoming dead to self and alive to God, through self-denial via spiritual disciplines that chip away at the crusty old man and reveal, through pain, the slow emergence of Christ in me.
In Fall 2005, I'm preaching through the "Virtues of the Heart" -- fruit of the Spirit plus humility and hope. I'm doing it because I need it. I need to be continually transformed from the inside out. And if anyone else benefits from the overflow. praise God.
