Our pastor was talking this morning about how we need to continually acknowledge our need for confession and true (not surface) repentance. He said that is a weakness of the Evangelical tradition relative to others. He brought up communion as one of the ways we demonstrate this but suggested we could do much more to remind ourselves of this need.
I wonder though if even other traditions really do this that much better than us. Hypocrisy and pride have been pervasive in the church since the beginning - and even before: consider how much time Jesus spent warning against these things.
When our pastor mentioned this, I thought if we were truly able to be humble and acknowledge our need for grace, for confession, for repentance, and for forgiveness, how different our relationship to the world might be. If when people thought of Christianity, they thought not of pastors' loud condemnation of others, but of congregations on their knees in prayer before they take communion to remind themselves of how they were given grace, we might be conveying a very different but more theologically accurate image of ourselves. (I would love for this to be the vision of us people have.) In this way, perhaps some other traditions have done much better.
Of course ultimately how we are received is not the most important thing - though it certainly is important (as both Paul and Peter indicate in their letters). But if we did this better, it is not just the world that would have a more theologically accurate view of the church - perhaps the church could as well.
