Thoughts on the Church from Fosdick

And still, at its best, the church proclaims a living gospel which this huge, noisy, violent world critically needs. Granted the glaring faults of the church, the living gospel is too much alive for any church's failures utterly to deaden it. Despite our deficiencies, still in our churches at their best, lives are transformed, character is built, courage is renewed, faith is strengthened, ideals of personal and social conduct which else would die are kept alive, public-spirited devotion is engendered, and God's kingdom of righteousness on earth is made a living hope. (77-78)


Indeed, the God ordained vessel for which the work of the kingdom is to come to completion is a church empowered by the Holy Spirit and intently focused on the call of Christ to go make disciples. Without the church in our communities and our lives we would be missing not just a major force for change and good but the very instrument which the gospel can be confessed and proclaimed. We need the church now more than ever in spite of it's many faults and failures. I have had several conversations recently with people who have been hurt by the church...dare I say there is anyone who hasn't been hurt by the church or someone in the church in some shape, form, or fashion? Yet the church is also the place that we find healing and wholeness, grace and love, mercy and compassion and most of all new beginnings.

Ah, Church of Christ, the proclamation of such faith is your task today. You fritter away your strength on trivial sectarianisms. You insult the intelligent and alienate the serious with petty dogmatisms that do not matter. You fiddle trifling tunes while the world burns. But back of all that, still the glory of the true church within the church, is a message without which mankind is doomed. If you really believe the Christian gospel--God behind us, his cause committed to us, his power available for us--then proclaim it, live it, implement it, for humanity's hope depends upon it. It is indeed, a faith for tough times. (124) Emphasis added