What the church got right
An honest gratitude for Volume 5
The same church that built the slave trade also built the abolition movement. The same tradition that produced the German Christians produced Bonhoeffer and the Barmen Declaration. The same institution that silenced Galileo also preserved every manuscript that made the scientific revolution possible.
This is not an excuse. It is a description of what the church actually is: a community of people who are simultaneously recipients of extraordinary grace and perpetrators of extraordinary failure, who carry the most important truth in history in the most fragile possible vessels.
What the modern church got right:
It ended slavery in the British Empire — through Wilberforce and the evangelical conscience. It built the hospital system, the orphanage system, the modern university system. It produced the largest relief and development organizations in human history. It gave the world the abolition movement, the civil rights movement, the anti-apartheid movement.
It produced Teresa, Bonhoeffer, Tutu, King, Carey, Slessor, Judson, and a thousand others who went to the hardest places and stayed the longest and gave the most.
It preserved, copied, translated, and distributed the Bible in over two thousand languages — putting into the hands of every people on earth the text that says: God so loved the world.
And through all of it — through the failures and the recoveries, the betrayals and the renewals — it maintained the creed, the table, the prayer, the scripture.
The irreducible core was kept.
For the keeping, gratitude.
“Give thanks in all circumstances.”
— Paul, 1 Thessalonians 5:18
“It is of the LORD's lovingkindnesses that we are not consumed, because his compassion doesn't fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.”
The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases. His mercies are new every morning.
Written from ruins. Believed through plague. Confessed by people being burned and drowned and hanged and shot.
Still true.
The church that failed so many times is still here. The creed is still being said. The bread is still being broken. The prayer is still being prayed.
Not because the church earned its survival. Because the love it was built around is steadfast — which means it does not depend on the worthiness of the vessel.
Great is your faithfulness. Not ours. His.
That is the only reason any of this is still standing.