Confessional Booth

Christians are so hypocritical! We’ve all heard this statement before—and sadly, it’s often true! “In his book Blue Like Jazz, Donald Miller tells the story of how he and his friends built a confessional booth on the campus of their liberal university. When people entered to confess their sins, Miller would instead confess to them the sins of the church, apologizing for the pain it has caused throughout history—its mistreatment of homosexuals and women, burning people at the stake, etc. Among the students on campus, this helped Christianity gain credibility and a hearing. That’s where our response to these charges needs to begin, and the model for this is Jesus. Jesus began his ministry with a call to ‘repent’ (Mark 1:15), but as historians point out, he was not talking to irreligious people. He was speaking to many of the most religious people of the day. Every person needs to start with a humble admission of his or her mistakes and sins, starting with us as followers of Jesus. As Christians we need to take responsibility for institutions that carry the name of Jesus. But we also need to clarify that these institutions do not always represent Jesus or reflect what he taught” (Mark Clark, The Problem of God: Answering a Skeptic’s Challenges to Christianity [Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2017], excerpted in “Hypocrisy Is Keeping People from the Church—An Excerpt from The Problem of God,” ZA Blog, August 25, 2017, https://zondervanacademic.com/blog/hypocrisy-is-keeping-people-from-the-church-an-excerpt-from-the-problem-of-god).