The Western Church and Its Blind Spots
An honest diagnosis, written by someone who loves the patient.
It is easy to diagnose and find fault with a church. The harder and more useful task is to name the blind spots of the church that is your own — not to condemn it, but because you intend to stay. What follows is offered in that spirit. I am not standing outside the Western church throwing stones; I am inside it, describing what I have learned to see only slowly, and often in myself first.
A blind spot is not the same as a scandal. Scandals are visible; we argue about them. Blind spots are the assumptions so deep that we mistake them for the gospel itself. Three seem worth naming.
The first is the captivity to the self. Much of our preaching, our worship, and our discipleship has quietly reorganized itself around the individual and his felt needs. The question we instinctively bring to a sermon is whether it helped me, moved me, applied to my week. That instinct is not evil, but it is small, and a church trained in it struggles to imagine a faith that is first about the glory of God and the good of a people.
The second is the captivity to comfort. We have, by historical standards, extraordinary ease, and ease has a theology. It teaches us to expect a faith that soothes more than it summons, that fits around our lives rather than reorders them. We are rarely tempted to deny Christ outright; we are constantly tempted to domesticate him into a life coach who blesses the plans we already had.
The third is the captivity to the nation and the tribe. It is striking how often, in our setting, Christian identity quietly fuses with political and cultural identity until it is hard to tell which is doing the real work. When the watching world can predict everything we believe from our partisan affiliation, the gospel has been folded into something smaller than itself.
I name these without despair, because the church does not depend on our competence. The same New Testament that exposes the failures of the first churches also addresses them as beloved, as saints, as the body of Christ. Diagnosis is not condemnation. It is the beginning of repentance, which is the beginning of health.
And the remedies are old and available. A worship that begins with God rather than with us. A discipleship willing to be inconvenienced. A loyalty to Christ that sits in judgment over every lesser loyalty, including our own side. None of this is novel. It is simply the faith, recovered — which is usually what reformation has turned out to be.
The Western church is not finished. It is being pruned, perhaps, which is a painful thing that healthy vines undergo. Our task is not to manage decline or to stage a comeback, but to be faithful in our own small place — and to let the Lord of the harvest do what we cannot.
— Sunny