No, the actual church isn’t the church in the stock photos. (Not sure what those guys raising their hands out in the middle of wheat fields are doing but I’m fairly certain it does not resemble what takes place in your worship service.) The actual church is a motley crew of sinners who are more primed together to really experience grace than they would be if they were all apart.

When we can get over the fact that the church isn’t Instagram-ready, something amazing happens. When we own up to our messiness, we actually open the door for real, undiluted, unadulterated grace. I mean, the mess is exactly what grace is for! You wouldn’t need grace at an Instagrammable church.

But at the real church? The one with the snot-nosed kids and the cantankerous old folks and the arrogant hipsters and the out-of-touch Baby Boomers and the pastor with his short-sleeved button-up shirt tucked into his high-waisted Dockers and the overweight “praise team”? Well, that’s the kind of place where grace can really show off.

Grace is pronouncedly stronger in churches that are profoundly weak.

No, the actual church isn’t the church in the stock photos. (Not sure what those guys raising their hands out in the middle of wheat fields are doing but I’m fairly certain it does not resemble what takes place in your worship service.) The actual church is a motley crew of sinners who are more primed together to really experience grace than they would be if they were all apart.

And when grace takes over a church? When grace changes the conversation? When we stop sucking in our guts and stop with the religious preening and stop hanging around the margins, tapping our foot with our back to the wall? When we take a chance and get out and dance our dorky dance and risk looking stupid in front of each other in order to finally, at long last be ourselves?

Okay, sometimes you get laughed at. Sometimes it goes badly. I’m not going to lie to you. It doesn’t always go so well. If you’ve been a follower of Jesus for any significant length of time, you probably have some experience of finding your risk-taking for grace landing you right on your face.

When I was a very young man trying to figure out what it meant to pursue a call into vocational ministry, I found myself in a very painful church experience. I was desperate for a mentor, but the men in leadership around me seemed downright hostile. I could not figure out what I had done wrong, and I couldn’t get a meeting with any of them to ask how I’d offended them. Instead, I lived every ministry day in the middle of a bizarre kind of psychological warfare. It was about enough to make me give up the idea of ministry all together.

I was young, green, vulnerable. And I got chewed up and spit out. “If this is what church behind the public curtain of Sunday mornings is actually like,” I thought, “I don’t want to have anything to do with it.”

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