why should we love the church?

Since I wrote my last post on Tuesday, I’ve continued to think about the topic of loving the church. I started to think about why we should love the church. Since I feel that we should love the church, then it seemed natural to me that I would want to know why I should.

I just started reading a book that speaks to this from the first chapter, Messy Church: A Multigenerational Mission for God’s Family by Ross Parsley. Right from the beginning, the book talks about church being about family. That the church is a family that we are part of.

One particular quote from the book, explained it in a better way than I can:

“We need the kind of family that knows us, our fears and faults, but loves us anyway; the kind of family that will invest and forgive no matter what. It’s a community of people who share privileges and responsibilities as we learn how to live together in harmony. Church can’t be a place where we feel like a visitor, or somewhere we’re afraid to allow others to see our messages. It’s got to feel like home.” (Ross Parsley, Messy Church)

To me that describes church at its best – a family where we feel at home. And I think that makes a pretty good case for why we should love the church.

If you stop and think about it, we love our families even when they drive us crazy, or do something that hurts us, or make us mad. And we love them when they do good things too. If we do this with our families, doesn’t it make sense that we should do the same with our church families? In my books, it does.

I think when it comes to answering the question of why we should love the church, it comes down to how we view our church. If we view our church as a family, then we should be loving it the same as we love the families we grew up in (or wish we grew up in). A church family loves each other through everything – whether it is good or bad.