'Forgive Us'

I attended Catholic school for one year as a child. My second-grade year in Philadelphia's St. Athanasius left me with a strong sense of the mystery of the church. The most mysterious space there was the confessional booth. I wasn't allowed to enter because I wasn't Catholic, so I just sat and watched others enter with pinched brows. Then they would exit with peace painted over their faces.

 

There is a scene in the book Blue Like Jazz where author Donald Miller sets up a confessional box in the center of the Reed College campus. But Miller's confessional worked in reverse. Students of Reed, which is known as the most liberal campus in the country, entered the confessional booth with curiosity, cynicism, skepticism, or worse—to disprove this thing called Christianity. But what they encountered upon entry was disarming—even healing. Rather than prompts to confess their sin, Miller sat on the other side of the veil and confessed of the sins of the church. This was a revolutionary act in the context where, according to Gabe Lyons and David Kinnaman's modern classic, UnChristian, the general consensus about Christians is decidedly negative.

 

The authors of Forgive Us: Confessions of a Compromised Faith (Zondervan, September 2014) took Miller's cue. We thought: What if the church at large began to own its sin and confessed it to the world? And what if we took those confessions and worked them out through active repentance?

We remembered God's promise in 2 Chronicles 7:14: "If my people who are called by my name humble themselves, pray, seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land."