I like church full of people who are easy to love. I’m drawn to the kind of people Jesus describes in Luke 6:24-26: the rich, the full, the happy, and the popular. Jesus pronounces woes on them, but they sound like the kind of people I want in my church.
Every church I’ve known, though, has been full of the opposite kind of person: the poor, the hungry, the sad, and the spurned (Luke 6:20-23).
Churches aren’t always full of the kind of people we find easy to love. Every church seems to have people who talk too loudly, miss social cues, share a little too much about their personal lives, and who just can’t pull it together. Church is not a collection of people who have their lives together. It’s a gathering of the broken, the jobless, the ill, the quirky, and those who are barely hanging on. They make demands on us. They make us uncomfortable.
And we need them. In fact, my biggest conceit is thinking that I’m not one of them.
The weakest and most demanding aren’t in the church by accident. It’s part of God’s design. Jesus pronounces blessings on them. In a culture obsessed with wisdom, Paul reminds the Corinthians that they’re nothings (1 Corinthians 1:26-31). He boasted in his weaknesses and spoke of the value of the weakest parts, least honourable, and least presentable parts of the church (1 Corinthians 12:22-26). He even boasts in his own weaknesses and sufferings (2 Corinthians 12:9–10). The very people who lack honour and who never flaunt themselves are indispensable to the church.
We need them for a few reasons: because the church isn’t built on human strength but on God’s power; because God loves to humble the proud and exalt the lowly; and because we need to learn to boast in God’s grace in our weakness rather than in our strengths. We need them because, in the end, we’re all weaker and less impressive than we think we are.
It goes against the way I normally think, but I’ve come to see church as incomplete without the weak and without those society would consider to be unimpressive. We need the ministry of the weakest. We need to sometimes walk at the pace of the slowest, to enter into the complexities of suffering, and to put up with those who do nothing for us. We need to see these qualities in ourselves.
Spurgeon spoke of God’s strange choices:
It is clear to every one who will observe either Scripture or fact, that God never did intend to make his gospel fashionable; that the very last thing that was ever in his thoughts was to select the élite of mankind, and gather dignity for his truth from the gaudy trappings of rank and station. On the contrary, God has thrown down the gauntlet against all the pride of manhood; he hath dashed mire into the face of all human excellency; and with the battle-axe of his strength he has dashed the escutcheon of man’s glory in twain
I’ve come to appreciate the ministry of the weakest and the most humble. As you look around your church, praise God for their ministries, and for how God exalts the lowly and cares for the weak. It’s the only hope that any of us has.
