I’ve insisted many times over the years that the indispensable Christian belief in Original Sin is a teaching that summons the damaged, the dysfunctional, the screwed-up — that it is a belief so innately unwholesome that no healthy adult can regard it as anything but a perversity. Well, what do you know? Here’s a preacher to say, Yup, the church exists to attract messed-up folk.
Misfits, Malcontents, and Knuckleheads: Welcome to the Church
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This is a fundamental church principle. Church, done right, is always going to be messy. Maybe one of the problems with the Southern Baptist Convention today is that we’ve become so respectable! But the church is God’s refuge for messed up, sin-burdened people who are in the process of transformation. The country club mentality has to go.
You are called to God’s ER, not to Augusta National.
Correction: The SBC’s problem is not that it’s uber-respectable, but good at attracting barely functional wackos. And Dave Miller, the author of this piece, insists that the pleasure of his Invisible Friend is more important to him than his spouse or children — so I’m not sure that he’s all there, either.
But when even a guy who isn’t himself real clear-headed acknowledges that there sure are a lot of crazies in the pews, I think that settles it.