Reflections on Church History before the Reformation

Okay.  This is not exactly a songwriter-ish post.  Don't care.  My blog.  My rules.

Today, I finished lectures for a class at Gordon-Conwell Seminary: Church History to the Reformation.  Thursday, I take the final.  But I digress.

As I was taking out the compost tonight, I was pondering what the take-away is for me on the sweeping history of the first millennium and a half since Jesus Christ invaded the world with His Kingdom, gave His life for our salvation, and bodily rose and ascended to the right hand of the Father, changing everything.

The take-away, I think, is this:

The Church is a story of beauty and horror - selfless acts of love and atrocities committed in the name of Love, humble servants and demagogues, sublime words of praise and heartless words of condemnation - there really can be only true Hero of the Christian Faith.  Jesus truly, as it says in the letter to the Colossians, holds all things together.  Paul may have had no idea when he wrote that, but I think he was prophesying about the Church as well as the universe.

It is a miracle that, to this day, a Body known as the Church (splintered though it may be, but I think many divisions are healing right before our eyes), still exists, still shines the light of Christ on the world, still is learning, slowly but surely, to love.

While may look to the mess that is the Church as a reason to reject Jesus.  I think it's the mess of the Church that makes me trust Him more every day.  Any other group that's this horribly battered, scarred and ashamed of its past, would have packed it in long ago.  But Jesus never gives up on His Church.  He once redeemed Her.  But He keeps on reforming, reclaiming, reshaping and repairing Her, preparing Her to be - not a horrible mess, but a radiant, spotless Bride.