I’m struggling with forgiving the church.

You see, I want to forgive the church with all of its foibles and shortcomings but that means if I forgive the church then in the future, I can’t bring up what it’s done wrong in the past. And heaven forbid that I actually put into practice something that God tells me to do.

I’ve always thought of myself as more of a forgiver than a grudge-holder, and I tend to be, but I do have my occasions when I hold grudges as good as someone in the mafia. It took me about 15 years to forgive my classmates for teasing me in grade school (and I’m not that old). I say that I’ve even forgiven my coworkers from three years ago but if I see any of them again, I have no doubt that what they said about me would be the first memories to rush back into my mind.

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I met with someone in my church on Wednesday morning to discuss a lot of the issues I had about my church. He didn’t fix them but he was kind, listened to me ramble, and offered advice when he could.

The problem with me is that I had an issue with how certain things were handled several years ago, swept my issue under the table (“It doesn’t matter anyway/won’t change things”), and kept moving forward. The problem is, I swept that issue under the table but never used a dustpan to remove it. It just stayed there. And I continued to sweep and sweep, never using a dustpan until this huge pile of dirt began festering and became noticeable enough that I needed to take care of it.

And was everything handled well? Not really. But that’s where forgiveness comes in. I need to recognize that people do the best they can but we all will fall short along the way. I need to wipe the slate of my mind clean and look at others without bias and judgment.

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I often wonder, however, whether I’ve outgrown my church.

Outgrown really isn’t the correct word. More like grown apart. I suppose this is an issue I would have had to contend with whether or not the pastor left.

I notice things now that I hadn’t noticed before. Perhaps because I am struggling with discontentment, I find things to grumble about. But because I notice them, I want them to be addressed. I also, however, need to recognize that we have installed a new pastor and that things are very well changing behind the scenes and haven’t been conveyed to the congregation yet. I also need patience.

For a period of two-plus years, my church was without a pastor. As the person I met with on Wednesday said, the church went into “survival mode.” Two people (who were not in full-time ministry) were charged with basically keeping this 100+ (and growing) congregation together.

But things fell along the wayside. Or perhaps it was an issue that had always fallen along the wayside.

My church is located in a nice, suburban, middle-class to upper-middle-class area west of Philadelphia. The area is heavily Catholic, surrounded by Catholic churches or Catholic schools. It is a bustling town right along the Schuylkill River. The town is predominantly white, however, there is a prominent pocket of Koreans in one section.

Then there is a strip that runs along the side of town where many of the minorities live. Blacks and Hispanics reside along this street and I’m told that is the seedy part of the town—where the drug dealers and hookers are. But it is also where, I’m sure, some honest hard-working people cannot afford to leave because the main part of town is much too expensive to live in.

My church is reflective of the majority population of the area: white and middle-class to upper-middle-class. Even the minorities in our church (you can count on one hand and the group includes me) are more along the well-to-do side. To paraphrase Tim Keller’s lament in his bestselling book, The Prodigal God, I am in a church of elder brothers that is desperately in need of younger brothers.

Despite my spiritual depression, I have been struck by how much I have learned about Jesus’ personality through all of my readings. I seem to know him better than I did even two or three years ago. I am constantly amazed by the examples in which Jesus spent time with the people we consider the refuse of this world: the lepers, the blind, the lame, the weak, the prostitutes, the women, the tax collectors, the obvious sinners. But Jesus wasn’t discriminating, he also spent time with the Pharisees and the Saduccees—those who wanted to meet with him but in secret. Jesus was willing to meet with anyone anywhere who wanted to meet with him.

If Jesus were around today, I think he’d be hanging around drug dealers and users, alcoholics, womanizers, gays, HIV-positive patients, Las Vegas showgirls, porn stars—part of the people who will readily admit that they don’t have it all together. But Jesus would probably meet with politicians, Hollywood stars, CEOs, white-collar workers, Wall Street businessmen—all the people who pretend like they have it all together but in secret, are really searching for something or someone to give their life real meaning.

Jesus was never an either/or kind of guy. Why must his followers be? Why can’t a church that arguably could be considered wealthy reach out to the people that Jesus would have reached out to? Is the church’s message so comfortable that it alienates the outcasts and welcomes the moralists?

For all of my complaining, I don’t have any solutions. My first step, however, in 2011 will be to read the book When Helping Hurts to discover the appropriate ways to reach out to a poorer, minority-filled community. I can’t imagine that it would be good for either me or that community to barge in and start doling out food without first discovering how to appropriately minister to their needs. The fact that I look more like them could be a help or a hindrance. I don’t know. But perhaps the fact that we share a darker skin color has given me a burden to reach out to them.

People say one person can make a difference. I don’t know. I think I share more of Hillary Clinton’s perspective in that “it takes a village.” I don’t know if I can make a difference in anyone’s life or if I can accomplish anything at all as one person. But I would like to get the ball rolling.