Has The Church Done More Harm Than Good?

Photo by Clem Onojeghuo on Unsplash

“How did your sermon go?” asked my dad on Monday morning. “It was a talk, dad,” I said. “And I made someone cry”.

He wanted a cappuccino and a caramel square. His car was in for a service, and he needs me to do things these days like pick him up from places and drop him back because his legs don’t work very well anymore. “Do you want to go for a cup of tea,” I said, “while you’re waiting” because I remembered somewhere I’d been last year and they had this festive sign in the lobby, four huge letters with lightbulbs in them, and I’d meant to take him to see it before it was too late and it was twelfth night and it was packed away, but then I didn’t, and I regretted that. And I hoped it was there because I hadn’t checked in advance, but I didn’t say anything until we’d sat down, and I’d done a recce and spotted it, and it was far beyond what I’d hoped for. It wasn’t in a corner this year. It was the centrepiece. It was perfect, almost as if it had been divinely prepared for us.

I’ve been doing a course on Thursdays, and I was keen to get to the “Has the church done more harm than good?” session because for the last couple of months I’d been thinking this Christian apologetics stuff is all great, lovely, appealing, with its rational explanations about why we should trust the Bible and why we should believe in God’s existence and why faith makes sense of life but what about the church? I wanted to talk about the church because I see myself as a bit of a critical friend and its PR is pretty terrible at the moment.

And during the session, I was mostly thinking about my own denomination and how I often want to put my head in my hands at its narrow-mindedness and its political-correctness and its obsession with protecting the institution at all costs but mainly at what the ‘secular world’, as it likes to call it, might see as a complete lack of love and grace. The session happened to be in a week when abuse was once again in the headlines and the Archbishop of Canterbury had resigned, not for the doing of the harm, but for not doing enough about the harm, which was also known as a cover-up. It was in a week when I’d been to see Small Things Like These¹ and I’d wept at the systematic dehumanising of generations of pregnant Irish women. “On the first day at a Magdalene Laundry, women and girls who had been sent there had their hair cut off, their names replaced, and their possessions taken. In the days and weeks that followed, everything else was stripped from them”². The laundries were “sites of erasure” this article said. Being made in the image of God was irrelevant. Loss of self was the goal. I was angry, so angry, at the extent of the societal collusion. “Clergy may have brought people to these institutions. There are also magistrates, GPs, social workers, probation workers, midwives in local hospitals, builders who worked at the institutions,”³ said Leanne McCormick, Co-chair of the Truth Recovery Independent Panel, which was gathering evidence about mother-and-baby homes and workhouses. There was the doing of the harm, and then there was the harm of doing nothing.

It seemed no denomination was a safe place. But it hadn’t crossed my mind to consider the role of the church in the Crusades and the Transatlantic Slave Trade and colonialism and the erosion of indigenous cultures. “The church’s ugly past is shameful,” said the lecturer. “A loving God can seem so far removed from these distortions of faith,” she added. “It’s ironic that the standards by which the church is being judged are deeply Christian”. When it is accused of misogyny and scapegoating and denying human rights, it is merely being asked to account for the outworkings of the values it espouses. “It is a valid moral objection to say I can’t be part of an institution which harms people,” she said.

“I don’t know why I am still here,” I say about church when I am despondent about the good. In a week when middle-class women of a certain age have been in the news, and I wondered if I should just write about this tribe I supposedly belong to who are shaking their toned arms at Gregg Wallace, I remembered when I mentioned looking into why many women of a certain age are leaving the church, the lecturer said, “a woman’s first priority is to protect her child”.

And as I left the session, words from 1 Peter were ringing in my ears. “For it is time for judgement to begin with God’s household”.

My talk was at a women’s service, and I didn’t call it a sermon because I didn’t think I was allowed to. Preaching was meant to be stamped with some sort of ecclesiastical approval like a theological degree and a recognised calling to proclaim the gospel that you’ve wrestled with, and the right type of voice, formal, stilted, an unnatural cadence, sticking closely to the text, being wary of context or opinion. I hadn’t signed the Westminster Confession. I’d been asked in M&S. “Are you sure?” I’d replied.

But I’d done lots of talks in other situations, and I reckoned whilst structure mattered and I’d definitely do introduction-content-conclusion, heart mattered more. And I decided it wouldn’t be dull because it was a crime to be dull when exegeting. I’d do storytelling. I’d make it personal to those who were there. Above all else, it would be encouraging. I’d use my voice, the one I’d been given, my informal one, with its own unique cadence. And I’d talk about love because the reason why the church has done more harm than good is because somewhere along the line it's lost that radical message of love that Jesus taught.

And so, I talked about love in the supermarket and in the Tots and in the Girls’ Brigade and in the boxing club and in the community and love for the nine people I am most responsible for, the ones I am in closest proximity to, the teenagers and the man I’ve been partnered with and the octogenarians with all their health issues. I lingered on feet washing and a couple of vital verses in John about loving one another. I said we are called to love everyone wherever we are placed, not everyone everywhere, just everyone we can manage. I said it wasn’t complicated, but it might be hard. And I read this quote:

“You know most people when they imagine an environment where Jesus will form them into a radical gift of sacrificial love for the sake of others picture a soup kitchen or a rehab program or a third world village. And don’t get me wrong, it could very well be that. But it’s also in ordinary service, ordinary places and among ordinary relationships in an environment more like the office for the business executive or the kitchen for the stay-at-home parent, the classroom of the high school student, the studio of the designer, the shared living space of the college dormitory, the dinner table of the married couple. Jesus is grounding the most sweeping, cosmic, glorious of promises in the most common, ordinary place among ordinary company by taking up ordinary service and doing all of it in the name of love. And that is both a comfort and a confrontation. Because the truth is that most of us are much better at carrying out projects of love than we are at becoming people of love”⁴.

The sign with the four huge letters and the lightbulbs said NOEL, my dad’s name, his middle one, not James, the one he was christened with, but the one he is known by because he was born just before Christmas, 84 years ago.

And when I did my sermon talk on Sunday, it was to a small congregation, one not even considered viable in terms of institutional KPIs but they’d always welcomed me, especially when I was confused about where I belonged church-wise, and I told them that, and I thanked them because that was love.

When I showed my dad the sign and he couldn’t quite take it in, I was glad there was a chair beside it so he could sit down because his legs don’t work very well anymore. It was kind of miraculous, that chair, and he got his photo taken like he was waiting for Santa, and it was as if eighty-plus years had vanished in an instant.

And a man who was a minister asked me at the end was I glad my talk was over because his wife would be consumed by something like that. And I reckoned he should be consumed by it too, this preaching, because the first question I’d ask a preacher is “Do you love these people?”. But I didn’t say anything. I left my feminist high horse in the stable. And when I came home, I had a glass of crémant to recover and I decided no one must ever know about this because it was only a talk. But I’d made someone cry. She said she’d realised she had loved where she had been placed and that was enough and I spent the last hymn with my arm around her and as we sang one line of He Will Hold Me Fast and she blew her nose and we sang another, I held on to her and she held on to me. And that is love too.

And I believe the church is called to go out and do this good thing that is love, one act at a time, one act after another. That is why I am still here.

Next Week: Those Same Old Songs Every Single Year (My Thoughts On Christmas)

1. Small Things Like These

2. Article

3. BBC News

4. Podcast