Here’s an abrasively honest passage from a good, little, recent introduction to Christian faith I’d been meaning to read for a while and finally got to.

The church, rather than being an association of like-minded people, is more likely to be a group of people you would never choose to be friends with if they were not also friends of Jesus. Paul sees his fellow Christians as something less than the cream of the crop: “not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth” (1 Cor. 1:26). In Aristotle’s terms, they are often neither useful nor pleasant. When the Spirit binds us together in the church, it is often with people whom we find unappealing, unhelpful, unlovely — the kind of person we might see at a party and think, “Who invited him?”

from Fred Bauerschmidt, The Love that is God: An Invitation to Christian Faith (2020), 103.

The paragraph leaves me with two questions.

If that description of church resonates with me, where might I be complicit in leaving others with a similarly unremarkable impression of church?

If fellow churchgoers aren’t always particularly useful or pleasant, what can be said about them? The answer, of course, in various degrees and capacities, is means of grace. Here Flannery O’Connor at least might remind us, no one chooses their own evangelists.

Bauerschmidt’s ‘invitation’ is spritely and delightful. The book’s organized around the following five simple claims, and he manages to get an impressive amount of mileage out of them.

God is love.

The love that is God is crucified love.

We are called to friendship with the risen Jesus.

We cannot love God if we do not love each other.

 We live our love out from the community created by the Spirit.