Broken Steeples, Mended Souls
A reflection on a flawed church and a faithful God
This article is part of the Claritas spring 2024 issue, Home.
By: max yap
Twelve time zones, three flights, two layovers, an ocean and a continent away; for an international student, it often feels like a chasm separates home and me. Instead, I usually stay stateside and the lead-up to each break is a mad rush of emailing friends to find out where I’ll crash for a day, week, or month. The last two winter breaks, I’ve been in Boston, not through any particular childhood attachment to the place, but just because that's where my parents happened to know friends who were willing to host and feed a hungry twenty-one-year-old. And so it turned out that, for the last two Christmas services, I attended Park Street Church, perhaps one of the better-known congregations in the Northeast. Both times, I was encouraged by the message of the preacher and the warmth of the people I met, not dwelling on a mention in the sermon of how the church had earlier in the year closed its third congregation due to some disagreement.
It was only when running out of ideas for an article (not this one, of course), that I was trawling through Christian publications and typing in “comfortable,” “family,” and “hospitality,” to see what articles came up to jog my thoughts. I saw the first headline in Christianity Today read, “Park Street Divided: Congregation Asked to End Conflict with a Vote.” [1] The historic congregationalist church had become roiled by controversy over the firing of a popular associate minister in August, with questions arising over the senior minister’s spiritual leadership and accusations of authoritarianism leading to an abuse of spiritual authority.
During my visits to the church, none of this had ever come up. For my own part, I had blissfully wandered my way through each Sunday morning service I attended. How could I have been so blind to miss, in the words of one of Park Street’s elders, the deep “bitterness and poison of a divided congregation?” [2] How often have I been blind in the past?
I was raised in a church that was largely scandal-free. The one financial mishandling I dimly recall was in my early teenage years, and it swiftly concluded with a public admission of guilt onstage and a call for forgiveness and redemption by our elders. The church has been nothing short of life-changing for me and my family; a place that has both taught me about God’s character and shown it through deep friendships that I still treasure.
And yet.
Growing up as a Christian came with an intermittent news cycle of scandal and shame that was impossible to ignore. In 2010, Singapore’s biggest Criminal Breach of Trust case involved City Harvest, a megachurch whose founder was found guilty of misappropriating some fifty million dollars of church funds, of which twenty-four million were to bankroll the pop-music career of his wife. In 2018, a grand jury investigation into Pennsylvania dioceses exposed the systematic cover-up by the Catholic church of abuse by “over 300 predator priests,” with more than 1,000 child victims. [3] In 2019, the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News published “Abuse of Faith,” an investigative series reporting that 220 Southern Baptist church leaders and volunteers had been convicted of or pleaded guilty to sexual misconduct in the past two decades. [4]
Perhaps the most disheartening was the four-month investigation that found the late Ravi Zacharias, a world-famous Christian apologist, systematically abused massage therapists for more than a decade. At the time of his death, he was remembered “for his faithful witness, his commitment to the truth, and his personal integrity.” [5]
Often these tragic events are minimized as the sin of individuals, “bad apples” who have abused their positions of power in situations similar to secular leaders. Yet it is a pattern that, though in no way excusing individual responsibility, often stems from wider failings of church bodies. For example, in 2019, when Jennifer Lyell, a former publishing executive for Lifeway Christian Resources, told Baptist Press, the official Southern Baptist Convention news service, that she had experienced abuse for years at the hands of a former Southern Baptist seminary professor, his undeniable abuse was mischaracterized in a news story as a “morally inappropriate relationship.” [6] It was only in 2022 that the SBC’s Executive Committee formally apologized to Lyell for “its failure to adequately listen, protect and care for [her] when she came forward to share her story of abuse.” [7] For many others, church leaders fail to address issues when they are brought up, often on the basis of “protecting” the kingdom of God and avoiding airing dirty laundry in public.
Why dig this up? Why, in an issue themed around home, should we talk about the deep ways that God’s people are broken? As previously mentioned, I’ve been loved and uplifted by the Church and the people that compose it, despite all of my own failings and mistakes.
Yet I find that loving the Church is akin to loving my parents as I grow older; their incredible care for me does not excuse what frustrates me about them. They still have flaws that prevent them from being the perfect parents that God calls them to, indeed from being the perfect parent that God is.
In the same way, time spent in the Church inevitably brings a familiarity of its virtues as well as its flaws. We come to the sober realization that the church is flawed and made up of broken sinners. As Christians, we are certain we will face challenges in our faith, and we prepare ourselves to defend from obstacles outside the church, not from within. Pulpits and pews often warn against the world’s persecution, temptations, and pain. Yet for many, their deepest hurt stems from a place where they have the greatest hopes for rest and the ability to share their vulnerabilities.
For those of us who have walked unaware of the hurt in our churches, we have to recognize the faults in our own homes. In “The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory,” journalist Tim Alberta writes about his initial response to the accusations against Ravi Zacharias. “It was more than bias though. It was fear. We were afraid to see someone like Zacharias fall—not because of what [his morally reprehensible acts] said about him, but because of what it said about us. Weren’t Christians supposed to hold themselves to a higher standard?” [8]
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What is the Church?
To respond to our flaws requires us to consider what kind of entity we are. It is not quite right to view the Church as analogous to secular organizations, such as political parties, universities, or companies. The Church is special not because of its diversity of citizenship, the totality of its call, or even its vision of life beyond death; each can be found in other worldviews and religions. What makes the Christian Church distinct is the eternal mystery that God is a part of us; that we, together, through His body, are connected to the divine. Christ himself is the head of the body and the cornerstone of the temple; this idea is communicated most clearly through the Eucharist every Sunday when we are fed by Jesus through his body and blood. [9]
Our unity with God points to the fact that we are a group in process. The Church has never been perfect, as evidenced throughout the epistles, where Paul calls out congregations about sexual controversy, internal division over who to follow as a spiritual leader, and following false teachers. [10] The Bible is clear that even in the time when Jesus was still in the memory of eyewitnesses, churches were not filled with people who had it all together, but populated by people struggling with sin, unbelief, and theological confusion.
The Church, and Christians, live in an in-between time: a stage of imperfection during which we look towards a vision of complete unity. We can rest secure in Jesus’ love for the Church being so great that He laid down his life for her, buying her back from slavery to sin. [11] At the same time, we have not arrived at the marriage feast of the Lamb, where the Church is united with Christ in “fine linen, bright and pure.”
It is this tension, between an almost tangible hunger for a community caught up in Christ and the honest reality of people still in a broken and sinful world, that is so agonizing. At a Christian camp where I worked the summer before my freshman year, we would sing “Speak, O Lord, ’til your church is built / And the earth is filled with Your glory.” [12] During one of our lunches, a pastor remarked, “My heart breaks every time I hear that verse; because there is so much beauty and grace in the church, yet so much is left unfinished.”
The words of that song echo our ultimate hope; the church is a group in process but one whose ultimate destiny is in God’s hands. We see bits and pieces of the vision, yet we know God will bring it to completion in the end. The Church doesn’t fix itself; God himself had to come and pull it together.
In the here and now, loving the Church is a task that can sometimes be nothing less than impossible. In 1998, the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams wrote that “the Christian institution … is generally an anxious, inefficient, pompous, evasive body .… Why bother?”
Yet he answers his question. “Because of the unwelcome conviction that it somehow tells the welcome truth about God.” [13] The Church is where we find the words of life. To those who have been hurt, return to that truth. To those who are skeptical of what we believe, come taste and see Who is calling us. To those who live in the Church, let us embody God in truth, hope, and love. Let us honestly reckon with where we stand and in doing so, reach towards the eternal and perfect community that crests over the horizon.
Twelve time zones. Three flights. Two layovers. An ocean and a continent away; sometimes our home can be a very distant place.
[1] Daniel Silliman, “Park Street Divided,” Christianity Today.
[2] Silliman and Carvalho, “In Six-Hour Meeting, Park Street Votes to Affirm Current Leadership,” Christianity Today.
[3] “Pennsylvania Diocese Victims Report,” Attorney General.
[4] Banks, Adelle. “Southern Baptists’ sexual abuse crisis,” Religion News Service.
[5] Silliman and Shellnutt, “Ravi Zacharias Hid Hundreds of Pictures of Women, Abuse During Massages, and a Rape Allegation,” Christianity Today.
[6] Smietana, “Southern Baptist Executive Committee agrees to a resolution with Jennifer Lyell,” Religion News Service, 22 February 2022.
[7] Smietana.
[8] Alberta, Time. The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory.
[9] Ephesians 1:22; Ephesians 2:20
[10] 1 Corinthians 5:1; 1 Corinthians 1:12-16; Titus 1:13
[11] Ephesians 5:25
[12] Townend & Getty. Speak O lord.
[13] Williams, R. “No life, here – no joy, terror or tears”. Anglican Ecumenical Society.