Here is an oldie but goodie from Tony Campolo (my favorite radical). I ran across again this week and decided to share it here:

I would urge you to consider this fully, and to think about the words of St. Augustine: “The church is a whore, but she’s my mother.” That statement brilliantly conveys how I feel about church. It is easy for me, like so many of the young Evangelicals I know, to note the ways the church has been unfaithful as the bride of Christ. You don’t have to look too hard to see that the Evangelical church in America has a great propensity for reducing Christianity to a validation of our society’s middle-class way of life. Unquestionably, the church too often has socialized our young people into adopting culturally established values of success, rather than calling them into the kind of countercultural nonconformity that Scripture requires of Christ’s followers (Romans 12:1-2).
[Tony Campolo from Letters to a Young Evangelical]

Embedded in Tony’s comments is this remarkable quote from St. Augustine: “The church is a whore.” I guess thoughtful Christians have fully recognized the failings of the church for quite a long time, huh? But it is the second part of the Augustine quote: “she is my mother” that gives me pause today. It’s easy to bash the church for not being everything she’s supposed to be. [Although I'm not everything I'm supposed to be.] However, it is also the church that has given us the saints, teachers, reformers, and martyrs of the faith. It is the church that gave rise to the great social reform movements . . . that gave us Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, and Desmond Tutu, to name a few.

Disillusionment with the church can really only come from an accurate interpretation of what the church is meant to be, . . . and that doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It happens in the womb of the church . . . at least it did for me (that the desire to experience the kingdom of God “on earth as it is in heaven” is birthed) and at the bosom of the church (where that desire is suckled into a proper understanding of God’s mercy, peace, and righteousness). Even Jesus’ ministry came from within the temple culture of Judaism.

Jesus had myriad criticisms of that religious system (as did his prophetic predecessors), as only an “insider” can. Yet, it was that system that had spawned his devotion to the God, Yahweh. And it was his study of the Hebrew prophets that helped him to conceive of what Tony dubbed “the kind of countercultural nonconformity” exhibited by Jesus and his earliest followers.