No perfect church

Amy Welborn points to this moving testimony by an Evangelical who has endured a string of badly screwed-up churches, as a sign that brokenness and corruption recognizes no ecclesial boundaries. Amy comments:

The nugget I took away from her piece was something I have often told others struggling with this - and myself. The only respite she finds from the horrors of church politics and the damage of corruption in church leadership is in direct ministry to the homeless. I told someone struggling with these issues once to decrease his internet time, spent reading about and talking about scandal, and go to daily Mass, then hang out with the old guys who'd been in attendance, and were probably going for coffee right before they went to the St. Vincent de Paul center to do some corporal works of mercy.

True! If there's one piece of advice I would give to Catholics, Orthodox, Protestants or anybody else struggling with corruption and scandal in the church, it would be to get off the Internet and spend more time on prayer and doing good. I'm not suggesting a see-no-evil strategy. I am suggesting balance. In my case, I became so focused on fighting the (very real) evil that at the end, all I could see was the evil. My vantage point on the Catholic Church was no more realistic than the sunshine-and-fluffy-bunnies denialists that I'd come to both pity and despise.

In my case, I was like a soldier who tried to fight on righteous zeal alone, and both failed to build myself up in ordinary Christian ways (prayer, fasting, good works, spiritual reading), which would have strengthened me for the necessary battles, but also given me perspective on which battles were necessary, as well as perspective on what the ultimate goal of the fight was. It's understandable that those who see serious evil in one's church to get angry with those who deny the crisis, and who thus sit inert while bad people do bad things. But it is not the case that to focus only on the crisis, and to haunt websites and comboxes arguing about the crisis, and to make your church's crisis the focus of nearly every conversation you have with co-religionists -- it is not the case that you are therefore fighting for the right in your zeal.

This is a hard-won lesson that I've taken with me into Orthodoxy, which God knows has its problems. It's a lesson that I hope Orthodox, Catholics, Episcopalians and other Protestants struggling to right wrongs in their own communions take to heart. When Frederica wrote the other day about the temptations of the "stay and fight" mentality, I think this is what she meant. If you are going to stay and fight -- if that's what God calls you to do -- by all means fight intelligently, which means in part don't make the fight the focus of your spirituality. Which is very, very easy to do, because it's so dramatic, and it offers such immediate rewards. In the end, though, it could well be fatal.