Love, Truth & Church

And Another Thing . . . Love, Truth & Church

My parents were church goers. So when I was a kid, I went to church too. The church of my childhood was the non-instrumental Church of Christ. This was a great church to begin in because they were big on teaching young people about the Bible. Every Sunday night, all the children five and older were asked to come up front and share a verse they had memorized that week. The preacher would then quiz the kids about the Bible. I remember as a preschooler sitting with my parents and longing for the day when I could go up too. I learned a lot about the Bible in that church.

In fact, I enjoyed many things about the CoC. It was only when I was older and began to understand their take on biblical truth that I experienced a growing sense of estrangement. As a kid, I felt loved and included. I especially enjoyed listening to the a cappella singing. It was fun to hear men and women singing, from the shaped-note songbook, the harmonies to all of the old hymns. Shaped-notes were a now archaic musical notation system that made it easier to read and then sing harmony and our church would teach new members this system, as well as how to use a pitch pipe, and to lead hymns in 4/4 time. My early perspective was that shaped-notes were somehow more spiritual. 

Superior spirituality was an underlying theme in my formative Christian journey—a theme that was subtle and somewhat insidious. The fact that it affected me the way that it did may have more to do with my weaknesses than any intention on the part of my teachers, but I nevertheless interpreted what I learned as “My group is right and everyone else is wrong.” My knowledge, my truth, nurtured a sense of moral superiority. Paul admonishes believers to, “speak the truth in love.”(Eph 4:15) This has always been a tricky thing to pull off. First Corinthians 8:1 says, “Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.” I fear that much of my early Biblical learning resulted in a puffing up rather than a building up. Love gets messy, but truth feels clean and clarifying. Love involves giving of our self and dealing with all of our own insecurities in the process. Truth is of the mind and insulates our feelings and elevates our perspective above the fray of frailty. The challenge is to marry the two. To speak truth in the midst of our relationships with an awareness of our mess and insecurity is the call of the church. Love without truth is blind. Truth without love has clarity, but it isolates. Truth spoken with love directs, connects and elevates.

In the parlance of the KJV, the church is called to be a peculiar people. We are to love one another and the world like Jesus does. Unfortunately, it has become a cliché that our culture is frustrated and at times even disgusted with the church. Much of the atheism creeping into today’s culture has, at its root, a hurt or disappointment with people who claimed to be followers of God. Many are open to Jesus but are leery of his people. Not all of this is the fault of the church, but a significant portion of those who now doubt the church have been shaped by an encounter with her truth untempered by her love. Second Corinthians 5:14 says “Christ’s love compels.” God’s love is what changes everything. It is what changed each of us who claim to be Christ-followers. It is what changed me. 

The love I felt in the hearts of the good people of the CoC was the first taste of a reality I would continue to experience over and over again throughout my life. Later, I, too, witnessed hypocrisy and disappointment and doubted the truth of the Christian faith. It was the love of friends who were believers who showed me the reality of a God whose story I doubted, but whose love compelled. 

God’s love draws and changes us. 

God’s truth liberates and leads us. 

God’s Son makes all things new.

And that is all I have to say about that . . . for now!