I am currently reading Brene’ Brown’s Braving The Wilderness. There’s a quote (among many) that really spoke to me. The quote’s context deals with living in the tension of taking an opposing view. In this case, it was a Penn State athlete who supported the victims of Jerry Sandusky abuse and Joe Paterno’s silence.
The quote was
When you love a place like Penn [State], you fight to make it better, to own our problems and fix them. You don’t pretend everything is ok. That’s not loyalty or love, its fear.
I imagine it wasn’t easy for this person to take the victims side when there was an avalanche of support for the head coach Joe Paterno, but, because he loved Penn State, he wanted to make it better. That meant disagreeing with the masses.
This says so much about how I feel about The Church, God’s Bride. I see so much potential in Her, yet I am so mad with her much of the time. I could replace the word church with Penn and it would describe perfectly how I feel about The Church.
When you love a place like The Church, you fight to make it better, to own our problems and fix them. You don’t pretend everything is ok. That’s not loyalty or love, its fear.
When we do not speak up, when we do not challenge the status quo, when we avoid rather than offer our suggestions, we do not love that thing. When we do not try to make a thing better, it is because we fear the push back and the resistance.
How much do I love the Church. I have loved it enough to fight within it’s walls and I love it enough to know when to move on. The Church is not ok. If you love the church, your church, take a position to make it better.