A four-letter word escaped my mouth after my 15-year-old daughter said something that angered me recently as we drove to an after-school activity last month.
She turned to me and looked right into my soul.
“I don’t understand, Dad,” she said. “You act like you’re a nice person. You listen to Christian music. You pray. You go to church. Then why do you still do bad things?”
I paused for a few seconds to weigh her accusations.
“I go to church because of the bad things I do,” I responded, emphasizing the word “because.” “I’m still a sinner. We all are.”
This exchange has rolled through my head dozens of times since then, and it’s even more relevant because today is Easter.
A lot of people who aren’t generally in church might attend this weekend to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Some come for cultural or family reasons. Some come to maintain some connection with their faith.
But so many of them will be scared off by their perceptions of hypocrisy among churchgoers. They’ll be scared away by people who profess to want to live a better life in the model of the Messiah but live differently from it every day.
To these accusations, I say welcome to the church. We are a building full of sinners.
One of my favorite comparisons is to church as a hospital for the soul. You wouldn’t go to the doctor if you weren’t wounded. Of course everyone in there is wounded.
Some of us curse. Some of us battle addictions. Some of us harbor dark secrets.
I can’t imagine walking into the YMCA and looking around at the other people, thinking, “These people are all pigs. This place must not work.” No, it’s a work in progress, and you appreciate their progress.
All of us want to be better people, so we go to church.
It’s not as popular of an opinion as it once was. The Pew Research Center’s 2016 Religious Landscape Study showed the 22.8 percent of people were identified as “nones,” people who declared no religion by being atheist, agnostic or nothing in particular.
That’s creeping up on the evangelical protestants, at 25.4 percent, and it’s larger than the percentage of people declared Catholic (20.8 percent).
To those “nones,” “In God We Trust” is nothing more than a slogan. For those of us dreaming of an idyllic America that functions smoothly because we’re all living moral lives, that’s a terrifying prospect.
That’s why I go to church, this Sunday and every Sunday. I’m no angel, but with a lot of work and a lot of divine inspiration, some day I could be a saint.
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