THE CRY OF the church to the world should be “Forgive us.”
At a time when the American church struggles with finding its place in the world and struggles with asserting its identity, could the church be known as the community that models confession, repentance, and the seeking of forgiveness? At this moment in history, the American church is often ridiculed or portrayed as unforgiving and ungracious. Could the church offer a counter-narrative, not of defensiveness or derision but of an authentic confession and genuine reconciliation? By examining seven different areas where the church has committed sin, we ask the church to consider the spiritual power and the theological integrity of a church that seeks forgiveness for those sins.
Our scriptures testify to the necessity of confession. Confession is central to the Christian faith. The importance of confession arises from the Christian view of sin. Sin is a reality and must be taken seriously. Evangelicals consistently begin our gospel presentation with the centrality of sin to the human experience. American evangelicals often assert that the beginning of the work of God’s forgiveness is the recognition of our need for God because of human sinfulness.
It is antithetical to the gospel when we do not confess all forms of sin—both individual and corporate. The reason evangelicals can claim to be followers of Jesus is because there has been an acknowledgement of sin and the seeking of God’s grace through Jesus Christ that leads to the forgiveness of sin.
But in our corporate life, we spend a significant amount of time trying to deny our sin. We spend much of our time addressing the sins of others, while minimizing our own. We are willing to embrace the grace of God, but we do not often acknowledge the holiness of God, because we fail to confess how far we as a church have fallen short and continue to fall short of the glory of God. Our captivity to the hyper-individualism of Western culture may lead us to acknowledge that individual Christians have acted in an unworthy manner, but it often does not lead us to recognize our own complicity in corporate sinfulness and culpability.
It would be easy to blame the racists and sexists in the Christian community and distance ourselves from them. But we must begin to see the corporate responsibility that the church holds in our presentation to the world. How do we contribute and perpetuate the public wrongdoing of Christians through our silence and passivity? We acknowledge the many places in our nation’s history, as well as in contemporary Christianity, that have presented a sinful face to the world. In recognizing past and current sins, we, as people who uphold the tenets of scripture, have no choice but to offer up confession on behalf of the church.
Adapted from Forgive Us by Mae Elise Cannon, Lisa Sharon Harper, Troy Jackson, and Soong-Chan Rah. Copyright © 2014 by Zondervan. Use by permission of Zondervan. www.zondervan.com/forgive-us
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