“The only virtue of my generation is that it ain’t ashamed to tell the truth about itself.” –Flannery O’Connor, Why Do the Heathen Rage?

As Christ-followers we bear such a beautiful message – that God loves the unlovely, hears the cries of the weak, and through Jesus, has entered into the realm of the broken.

It. Really. Is. That. Simple.

So why doesn’t it get through? Why do so many churches struggle in speaking into the worlds they inhabit? Why does there seem to be such vast irrelevance in the Christian message when in fact it could not be more germane?

I have to think that part of the answer lies in the fact that Christ-followers somehow muddy its simplicity with the notion that they have to appear to have it all together in order to be heard.

In a peculiar little comment in 1 Corinthians 15:10, the Apostle Paul says, ‘By the grace of God I am what I am…’ For us the beauty of the Gospel is found, not in our ability to overcome, but in God’s ability – and willingness – to forgive in spite of our constant weakness.

This is actually part of the beauty of the Church – It is a community of real humans, each of whom is a mess to varying degrees, including and starting with its pastors! But it is a redeemed community. So any notion that we can hide the reality of our brokenness is ludicrous – and to the observing culture, this only translates into inauthenticity.

If you follow Christ then you have one asset in your message – that Jesus loves and has forgiven you in spite of yourself. Your instinct may be to believe that you have to be perfect before you can have any voice in the world, when in fact we are simply called to enter into it, and by our very presence to make our humble corners of the planet a little more beautiful.

Now some would pounce on this and say, ‘You’re watering down the Gospel’ (in fact some have)! But consider Jesus for a moment. How many times did He enter a home or a village or a mountainside, preceded by the announcement that He was Perfect… or the Savior… or Holy? The answer? Never. He didn’t need to. That conversation always came to Him, not the other way around. He knew that people longed for something that He embodied, and that if He loved them well and demonstrated that He cared more about them than His own interests and reputation, the rest would follow.

At the heart of our Faith is a God who sympathizes with our weakness, not merely because He is God and understands all things (which He does), but because He made the conscious decision to personally experience weakness – human weakness – our weakness – in order to make us His. In some way the extent of our brokenness makes what God has done all the more beautiful. Why cheat others of this lovely reality?

Listen, God wants you to be who you actually are. Somehow He will use this to translate His good news into a language other broken people can understand.

It’s what He liked about you in the first place.

That’s a good thing. Spread the word… (Part 1 ends here.)

There was a Church Growth study that came out over 20 years ago. It listed the three most important rooms in a church facility when it came to visitors. They were (in order), the Nursery, the Ladies’ Restroom and the Sanctuary. Essentially, what this study revealed was that by the time a visiting family entered into that church’s worship space, they had already determined whether or not they would return a second week. Before the sermon. Before hearing the music. It really is that practical at times.

Similarly, Jesus has offered a practical litmus test for the Church – a ‘mark’ (Francis Schaeffer coined this term in his booklet, The Mark of the Christian) that will determine whether or not the outside world will receive the Christian message as credible. We celebrate this defining characteristic each Maundy Thursday when we celebrate the Lord’s Supper. That word ‘Maundy’ comes from the Latin, ‘mundatum,’ and it means what it sounds like: Mandate, or Command. It is used in John 13:34-35 where Jesus says, A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.

Here is the thing: Apart from an observable love our message will be lost in translation every time. Because the Culture can’t hear what we refuse to embody – it just doesn’t translate into a discernable, or maybe a better word is, desirable, message. Jesus understood this and set the bar high by declaring that it would be by our love for one another that the world would know that we are His. And it only follows that anything

we would hope to speak into a broken world would have to first pass through the filter of a community that embraces the love it declares. In her book Living into Community, Christine Pohl writes, The best testimony to the truth of the gospel is the quality of our life together.

In a sense Jesus chose the most unlikely of dynamics to prove His own credibility to the world. Frankly, I am more comfortable thinking that I am evidence of all that is wrong with the world and the Church. But in some way that is the point. God demonstrates His grace through broken vessels and messy lives He redeems and weaves together in the fabric of love.

And so, amazingly, in spite of ourselves, it is in our life together, as God’s people, that we enter and speak into a world that reflects our own shattered stories, with evidence that Jesus has come with ‘healing in His wings’ (Malachi 4:2), born in how uncharacteristically we are enabled to love.

And what more powerful message than one that demonstrates that God can take such a collection of messy, self-interested, often obsessed-on-the-meaningless, diverse and broken people, and knit them together into something beautiful? How could there be anything other than hope for those who long for such healing?

What Good News.

Mike Khandjian is a Teaching Elder in the Presbyterian Church in America and serves as the Senior Pastor of the Chapelgate Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Marriottsviolle, MD. This article first appeared on his blog,

Unfinished1, and is used with permission.