A peculiar habit exists among evangelicals: constantly grandstanding about the perpetual failures of the church.
Just consider the parade of protest in the form of books, blog posts, and social media commentary, all haranguing the church for its failures, hypocrisies, and shortcomings. It’s a mode of self-examination that is hardly replicable anywhere else in American culture. Perhaps the self-criticism stems from an introspective desire to purify the church. That’s commendable, at least as a motivation for why Christians are zealous for self-appraisal. The last thing we need, after all, is Pollyannish attitudes that wave away legitimate criticism.
But consider the asymmetry between how Christians talk about the church and how others assess their own institutions. I do not see either the Republican or Democratic parties constantly pointing out their own failures. They do not air their dirty laundry for all to see. I do not see families impugning themselves. I do not see city governments malign their operations, even as they strive for greater success. Sure, each of these spheres may undergo critique from time to time, but not with the sort of sustained, prosecutorial heavy-handedness that describes how evangelicals talk about the church.
Perhaps this tendency towards lament and purgation stems from the church’s call to examine its inner workings. Judgment does, after all, begin with the household of God (1 Peter 4:17). A course correction does not mean professional-level spin about the church’s perfections. We are not called to act as though everything is perfect—we are called to hold in tension the reality that the church is a divine institution comprised of everyday sinners. At any given moment, it is possible to highlight the glories of the church and its ugliness—its feuds, factions, and failures. A failure to embrace that tension will lead to either resignation or false expectations.
But it is all too tempting to analogize the latest cultural controversy and show how the church is also captured by the same spirit of compromise. Where the culture faces a racial reckoning, so must the church, the thinking goes. Where the culture faces a #MeToo moment, so does the church. Where the culture examines its complicity in this or that social reckoning, so must the church. Perhaps certain episodes of this are warranted. We need not ignore genuine shortcomings.
May I make a suggestion, though?
Our public posturing about the church need not always be one of critique. How seemingly few in comparison are the articles lavishing praise and joy for the church Jesus came to redeem.
Even still, the constant framing of the Lord Jesus’ church as constantly at fault, constantly stricken by shortcoming, sells the church short. The church is “called out” people of God, a people who participate in the lone “pillar of truth” (1 Timothy 3:15). The ordaining of the church’s existence should chasten us from allowing criticism to become our primary method of discourse.
I also notice something about this constant posture of critique: the charge is levied against “the church,” not often toward a particular local church. The reason is obvious: It’s much easier to criticize a nameless, faceless church—the “evangelical church”—than it is to indict a church whose members you know or a church you were once a part of. It’s easier to criticize the kitschy sermons of some glitzy megachurch than it is to issue the same charge against the saints that nursed you in the faith. When I think of the “church,” my mind goes to the list of anonymous saints that taught me in Sunday School and who invited me to their house for fajitas after church. It is easy and cheap social media fodder that will get praise from those claiming “church hurt” to lambaste the church. It’s always easier to criticize the church out there rather than the church you are a part of.
Let me give you a permission slip: You can just love “the church” globally. You can love your local church. You should love your local church.
And let me make a suggestion: To love the church means to love her not in spite of her imperfections, but because of them. Every fault of the church is a reminder of our perfect savior. Jesus came to make the church beautiful and lovely to the hearts of sinners; He did not promise to make it perfect this side of heaven.
Allow me to suggest that a better posture for framing criticisms of the church, when warranted, is in the Reformational spirit of semper reformanda—the idea that the church must always be in a state of self-awareness, vigilance, and repentance. Semper reformanda guards us against ecclesial messianism, as though we believe our particular church is beyond question, while also protecting us against the narrative that history is just one unfolding saga of the church’s managed decline.
The Southern writer Walker Percy once remarked that the church’s continued existence amid its failures is “a sign of its divine origins, that it survives these periodic disasters.” He’s right. Percy was Roman Catholic, and he was speaking directly of his own church. I am not Catholic, but I think his broader point is worth dwelling on and can be applied by evangelicals: The church’s perpetuity is not a coincidence—it’s a promise of the church’s offensive posture that the “gates of hell shall not prevail” (Matthew 16:18). There has never been a “Golden Age” for the church—its existence is always buffeted between the reality of its divine inauguration, its shortcomings, its peculiar glories, and its promise of eventual consummation.
The church is neither so bad as to be undeserving of our love nor so perfect as to escape critique. Even so, let us remember: Jesus did not die for a church so that we can write articles endlessly hectoring it.
This article originally appeared at WORLD Opinions on May 6, 2026.
