My children grew up for the first part of their childhoods as the pastor’s kids. Two out of three did okay with that, but my younger son, the middle child, did not.He is an extremely intelligent and sensitive man. As a child he masked his sensitivity with his wit and made people laugh.He struggled with the difference between what he heard me saying about God, which I got from the Bible, and what he observed about the way people behaved in church, which he got from life.After I had resigned my last pastorate and we were attending a large community church near Portland, Oregon, I realised that he was being teased mercilessly by the children of well-off and privileged members of the church: people on the inside circle.By that time he was in junior high. They were teasing him about his appearance and having a good laugh at his expense. I wanted him to stick up for himself. He did not want to cause trouble.One day, after youth group in the evening, I found him wandering the hallways of the church, and he looked troubled.He told me that one of the boys had been ridiculing him without reprieve, pushing and pushing him, and that he had finally punched the kid in the face.While I was pleased and said so, he was utterly dismayed. “No,” he said. “It shouldn’t be this way in the church.”I felt instantly convicted, but in an odd kind of way. I knew he was right.It shouldn’t be that way in the church. But it was, and it still is, and besides all that, this was my son, and vicariously, through my son, I was happy that other kid got punched in the face.It was as if I had done it myself. The look on my son’s face caught me in the act.How can the church that Jesus formed from His sacrifice and the confession of Peter (You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God) be so screwed up? Can’t God make it be better than it seems to be?Just as children can see through the empty words of their parents, because, as the saying goes, “What you do speaks louder than what you say,” what the church does gives the lie to what the Bible says. I ask myself why it has to be this way.I can remember when the light of God broke through the darkness of my life.It was not that every experience was depressing and despairing; it was that all the exciting experiences no longer seemed to make sense and in the midst of that what the Bible depicted made more sense than anything I had ever encountered.I found that when I started talking with other Christians about what the Bible said, there was recognition and confirmation.We all knew together that something of supreme authenticity and value was being grasped by all. It was exciting to experience revelation.Then, after a few years, we no longer experienced new truth, for we had grasped the main concepts. What we did then was to rehearse those concepts with one another and play “gotcha” games identifying deviations.Now, after spending years conducting pastoral counselling, and then many more years practising clinical psychology and organisational dynamics, I realise that although the Bible contains God’s truth, the people who laud it are still broken.The church is filled with broken people, many of whom spiritualise their brokenness or obscure that brokenness through fantasies of utopia and apocalypse.In theology, a modified Calvinism states that although human beings are bad, not every human being is as bad as he or she could be.Total depravity does not mean necessary and absolute debauchery. I know many people who do not believe in God who behave better than most people I know who do believe in God.The kingdom of God is made up of people who trust in the words and works of Jesus even though their own words and works fall very far short of Him.So, it is not just that there are tares (weeds) that have been sown among the wheat, as Jesus described it in Matthew, chapter 13.We can understand a fraud acting in accord with what he or she actually is and giving the church a bad name because he or she happens to be simply masquerading as a Christian.What we have a harder time with is realising that the wheat themselves often make other people sick.You can be a Christian but still not be as good as you could be.You can believe things from the Bible that are true, but still talk about other people behind their backs, play one-upmanship with position and privilege among others in the congregation, envy people, cheat and live as if money were your god, serve your appetites and turn gluttony into a virtue, and make yourself look good in public while at home your family fears your outbursts of anger or the consequences of your addictions.It shouldn’t be that way in the church. My son was right. But it is.What do I tell those I meet who look at people in the church and question the validity of the Christian story because of the only visible proof they have that it’s worth spit: the people who are supposed to have become new creatures in Christ? What does that newness mean? What is it actually worth?That is a work in progress. We have been given a preview of how the story ends, both personally for each individual and corporately for the church and world, but the end of the story has not actually come yet.It is emerging in and through the very things we are doing.