Weakness

Yesterday Jenney asked me why the church couldn't attract enough people who were seeking. I gave her my opinion, and now I found something else on it...

Outsiders often look at the church, full of muddle and sin and shame and half-heartedness and back-biting, and clergy who don’t know what they are talking about and laity who go wandering off the point, and they say, “Well, if that’s what you’ve got to say about that wonderful message you talk about, you really are a muddled lot. How can you possibly be the body of Christ, the temple of the living God, as you say you are called to be?”

The answer comes again and again in 2 Corinthians. The glory of Christ is not revealed in spectacular show of success, in people who get everything right all the time. People like that, as we know, can sometimes be a pain in the neck. The church reveals the glory of Christ through suffering and shame as much as through what the world counts as success.

The way this happens is often enough that the church is called to be where the world is in pain, at the place where the world is suffering and in a state of shame and sorrow. The church is there as the presence of the suffering Christ in the world.

—N. T. Wright, Reflecting the Glory, p. 19