Last year my wife and I celebrated our 25^th anniversary by taking a cruise. While on the cruise we met a wonderful couple and spent a lot of time together. We talked a lot about family, friends, work and all the other things we had in common. We also talked a lot about church and God. Seems this couple had some bad experiences with a church just like most of us have.

Why is it that the place that should be the safest place in our live ends up doing the most damage? This is not exclusively the realm of the church. Families do horrible things to their members when the family should be a safe place. Still my thoughts revolve around the church.

I know the first response is usually the church is full of broken people and broken people tend to hurt each other. I’ll be the first to agree but this doesn’t really address the question.

The fundamental question here is what is the church? Is the church a hospital for sinners, a recovery group for sinners, a place to become better people, have better marriages, be better parents or is it something totally different. Is the church a place where we call the lost to join us? Is the church a place to experience and share the grace of God? I tend to think if we can answer the second question about purpose, we might understand the first question about hurting people.