Our awesome ministry intern, Douglass Anne Cartwright, has a great guest post up on Whiskey Preacher, our good buddy Phil Shepherd’s site. You’ll want to read it, especially if you have any love for theatre. Here’s a snippet as she reflects on one of her favorite musicals – Les Miserables:
So often I see the Church having similar characteristics to Javert — convinced of its “right-ness” and willing to go to any lengths to preserve the earthly justice over which it wants to have control. If you list out the sins of the Church throughout history, for each one of them, there’s a person (or several persons or a great many persons) who believed that what they were doing was right, no matter what the cost. Not far from that is the belief that only one entity (the Church) can be right, while everything else must be wrong. And, good intentions abound where ostracism, condemnation, and hell-fire are thrown about, and it gets harder and harder to see “right” and “wrong” in the midst of the smoke. Is the Church heroic? Is it villainous? Is it somewhere in the middle in a more-difficult-to-describe-category?
Read the rest to start your day. Is the church purely good or purely bad? Or are we just like the image of the banquet table I preached from last Sunday, good and bad mixed together, receiving the gifts of God? Or something else?
