When our children were small, they had a favourite CD of nursery rhymes that they played seemingly non stop in the car. One of the rhymes was Humpty Dumpty - but it was an edited version, with a verse added that said:
Humpty Dumpty counted to 10
Humpty Dumpty got up again
All the kings horses and all the kings men
Were happy to see him together again.
I didn’t like that the producers of that nursery rhyme collection gave Humpty Dumpty a happy ending. Because that simply is not real life!
Not all broken things can be fixed.
There may be the possibility of transformation through brokenness but that is not guaranteed and certainly not without a lot of painstaking work.
There are some in the church at present who seem to prefer tinkering with truth and editing the facts to secure a happy ending rather than engage with the real possibility that the church, as an institution, is broken.
And, until the systems that contribute to that brokenness are addressed, there will be no transformation. Addressing those systems, however, is hard work and resurrection is not guaranteed. So we just keep on patching things - and people - up and expecting them to achieve different results. And we do that by distracting ourselves with doing what we know rather than questioning how, together, we might be different.
It may be easier to sweep the broken pieces under the rug - radical change and healing demand courage and are not for the faint hearted but the pain and the cost of denial have been borne for too long, their scattered debris testimony to our tendency to take the easy way out. It is time to align ourselves with Christ who sits and weeps amidst the brokenness while holding in his hands the shards of hope.
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