I was talking to someone this week who is concerned about a family member who hasn’t come to church in years. The main argument that this family member throws up as an invitation shield is “there are too many hypocrites in the church.” In one sense, this family member is exactly on point. There are too many hypocrites in the church. In fact, every church is full of hypocrites because we’re all sinners and yet claim to follow God. (Now, I fully understand, some churches level of hypocrisy outshines others and are genuine deterrents to people getting involved).

But on its own intellectual merits, using the ‘hypocrisy’ argument is a lousy excuse to stay away from church. Here’s why: it would be like saying, “I’m never going back to that hospital, it’s full of sick people.” Hospitals are supposed to promote wellness and healing right? Hospitals hire people who have trained for years about the ways to fix physical maladies, yet the hospital stays full of sick people, because a hospital exists to make sick people well. With no sick people, it wouldn’t be doing its job. In the same way, the church exists to make spiritually sick people spiritually well, to help people achieve spiritual health and wholeness. So, from that perspective, if a church does its job right, it’s always going to be attracting new hypocrites to the church.

(To counter my own argument, if a sick person went to a hospital every week with the same illness for 20 years and never got better, I’d hunt around for a better hospital. If a hypocrite has gone to church for decades and yet continually suffers from the same hypocrisy, there’s a major dysfunction either with the hypocrite or with the church. At the end of the day, the church is supposed to help make hypocrites less hypocritical).