Living within and loving God’s church requires an experience with God and his amazing grace, but it also requires an intentional decision to forgive and love people who are less than loveable, according to Rob Bentz in his book The Unfinished Church: God’s Broken and Redeemed Work-in-Progress. It demands faithfulness and commitment to God, but it also demands faithfulness and commitment to his people.
Some of the wisdom contained in the book:
- The fact that God would call out a special group of people to love, draw to himself, call his own, shower with unspeakable grace, and then entrust with special roles and responsibilities in his kingdom work is quite astonishing.
- Without a clear recognition of God’s payment on behalf of his people, you and I will not see each other accurately. I won’t see you as God’s sees you—redeemed by the blood of his Son, Jesus.
- The church that Jesus is building is an eclectic, intriguing, quirky, diverse mess of humanity. That’s God’s way.
- Love is the one primary thing that God gave us to represent him. That’s why it’s nothing short of a tragedy when we do it so poorly.
- Genuine biblical encouragement is among the most frequently undervalued and over-assumed experiences of the Christ followers’ journey.
- Service is simply not about me, my happiness, my joy, my status, or my ability to cultivate a heartwarming story that I might one day tell others. At its core, service is about whom I am serving.
- Unity is the result of a great deal of heart-wrenching, God-seeking, others-forgiving effort. Jesus calls us to this immense personal and corporate challenge.
The church has become increasingly marginalized and seen as an irrelevant and outdated institution, even by followers of Jesus. The author makes a passionate defence of the church not as an idealized abstract idea but as the imperfect, complicated, difficult collection of people that it currently is. The book is reasonably short and interesting, but I am not sure how many readers will be willing to step up to the challenge of difficult unity when disposable relationships are so much easier.