Nothing New

Sceptics make the most of Pastors or other Christians who fall in their walk with Jesus. Failing, of course, is nothing new.

“When Christian believers gather in Churches, everything that can go wrong sooner or later does. Outsiders, on observing this, conclude that there is nothing to the religion business except, perhaps, business - and dishonest business at that.

Insiders see it differently. Just as a hospital collects the sick under one roof and labels them as such, the church collects sinners. Many of the people outside the hospital are every bit as sick as the ones inside, but their illnesses are either undiagnosed or mis diagnosed. It’s similar with sinners outside the church.

So Christian churches are not, as a rule, model communities of good behaviour. They are, rather, places where human misbehaviour is brought out in the open, faced, and dealt with.”

From Eugene Peterson’s introduction to the book of James - The Message.