"For where two or three gather in my name, there am I with them." This verse spoken by Jesus Christ, from the Book of Matthew, is a fine working definition of the church. You'll notice earlier in the same chapter, Jesus also tells his audience to point out the sins of a believer to the church if he should fail to listen. In our glossy modernity of iphone and ipad plastic, what is called the church is far too invested in gluttony to care about the sins of a parishioner, let alone their own.
If you ask a gay man in America what he thinks of the church, then you should already know the answer. If you don't, then you're a liar. It has been a bludgeon wielded against them. Effeminate attempts to claim that church has simply "been done wrong" misses the obvious conclusion. A brick and mortar church, that is as an institution, cannot exist in a land of peace and prosperity. It decays quickly into a spiritual cirrhosis.
The church as a city on a hill has only worked in times of persecution. This claim is easily demonstrable. The Black Church encumbered by chains gave strength to the voice that God was with them in the world of their present agony. The Confessing Church in Germany screamed out the Gospel as their lungs were choked from the smoke of human furnaces. It ought to go without saying that the Orthodox Church of both of these eras were firmly entrenched against the dignity of souls. The Southern Baptist Convention and Nazi "Positive Christianity" subsisted on political power and mere economic opportunism.
Once a church stops feeling the ache of every sinner's labored breath on this wretched planet is the moment I can and will tell it to go straight to Hell. Every church now, from the Catholics to the Anglicans, to the Russian Orthodox, to the smattering of tax-exempt American parasites, all of them are a monument to at least ineptitude... if not idolatry. Taking mission trips to vacation spots like Turkey, while the religion of their hometown smolders. Perhaps meeting as Christians in groups of two or three is preferable to tithing just so Liberty University can stump for the president. To many, it might be that the church is reduced to a piece of gothic architecture and a few funny hats.
The modern ecstasy-like concoction of church group-think has deluded us into thinking that faith is something other than a personal struggle. Faith never leaves the subjective. Attempts have been made otherwise, and from them have all come shameful notions. The yawn inducing yes-men of apologetics have failed and will surely continue to fail with their overt intent of making belief more palatable to the businessman born without want. One can get no further than finding God in oppressive silence.
