If there is anything the church should be, it should be real. One of the essential truths of the Christian faith is that we are all sinners. “No one is righteous, no not one” says the Apostle Paul! We are all in the same boat and it only floats in grace. There is no need to pretend and the church must foster an environment that encourages being real! If we cannot be real with our brokenness and sin in the church, there is a serious problem. As essential as this is, the inability for people to be real in church is a much too common experience. There are lots of reasons for this, but it seems that our nice, neat, tidy worship services and our unspoken rules of conduct are two of the things that seem only to foster a phony fastidiousness. The reality is that phoniness gets us nowhere in our relationship with God and nowhere in relationships with each other. If you are showing yourself as someone other than who you really are then what good is that? It is the one who is real with who they are—one who beats their chest and cries for mercy—that walks right with God. And it is the one that is willing to share and listen to stories of real life that walks in meaningful relationship with others. We must rediscover that the church is to be more akin to a messy living room than a showroom. The church is made up of real people with real struggles and it is supposed to be a refuge—a safe place where we can be encouraged to cry for mercy without the fear of being scorned.
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