By David Wilkinson
Valentine’s Day is a reminder that what the church needs today is a lot more love affairs.
Both the church universal and your church — the local body of baptized believers where you belong — need your love.
The church doesn’t need blind love, unrealistic love or misguided love. Indeed, the church will always need its critics, questioners, prophets and reformers.
Instead of empty criticism or, worse, selfish apathy, the church today needs followers of Jesus who have also fallen head over heels in love with Christ’s church. It needs the honest, sustaining love of mature Christians who recognize that, like a marriage, one’s love for the church must be grounded in a covenant relationship that requires grace, forgiveness and commitment.
Although he lived and wrote from within the Catholic tradition, Italian-born Carlo Carretto’s love for the Church with a capital “C” rings just as true for those of us in the Protestant and Baptist tradition. In The God Who Comes, Carretto confessed:
How baffling you are, oh Church, and yet how I love you!
How you have made me suffer, and yet how much I owe you … !
I have seen nothing in the world more devoted to obscurity, more compromised, more false, and I have touched nothing more pure, more generous, more beautiful. How often I have wanted to shut the doors of my soul in your face, and how often I have prayed to die in the safety of your arms.
No, I cannot free myself from you, because I am you, although not completely.
And where should I go?
Loving the church in the abstract has always been easier than loving the church in all its reality. Loving “the holy catholic church” or “holy Christian church,” as expressed in various Protestant versions of the Apostle’s Creed, is easier done in general than in the particular expression of the local congregation.
Amid the flowers, cards, chocolates and dinner dates this Valentine’s week, consider a few ways you can plant a loving kiss on the church where you belong. Tell one of your staff ministers how much she or he means to you. Write a thank-you note to a Bible study teacher who diligently prepares each week. Pay a visit to a member whose age and health have robbed her of the pleasure of gathering for worship with God’s people.
Throw caution to the wind and give an extravagant gift of love. Volunteer to serve. Write an extra check. Say yes to something that will require more than a casual commitment.
Recall sacred places and holy moments that were God’s gifts to you through the church. Remember your baptismal vows. Name the saints whose witness, spoken and lived, called you to deeper faith. Replay the ways your faith story and the church’s story have been entwined. Along the way, offer a prayer that God will help you fall in love again with the church — with all its faults and failures.
For many of us, the first step toward rekindling our love for the church may be the difficult step of forgiveness. Ask God to heal the wounds you have suffered from the church, even as you ask for forgiveness for your own unfaithfulness and the hurts you have inflicted. Ask for the courage to seek reconciliation with a brother or sister in Christ, knowing that a broken relationship has become an obstacle to loving the church.
“Loving the Church is our sacred duty,” wrote Henri J. M. Nouwen. “Without a true love for the Church, we cannot live in it in joy and peace. And without a true love for the Church, we cannot call people to it.”
This Sunday look with new eyes at the people of God you encounter on the sidewalk, in the foyer and sitting on your row in the sanctuary. Then ask God to help you fall in love again with God’s church — even, and especially, this church.