Church for Liars

Kenny has always loved church, attending with his grandmother as a child and even going on his own during his teenage years.  During college, his church attendance was sporadic, but now that he’s out on his own he’s trying to find a church to really become a part of.

The churches he’s tried so far, though, just won’t accept him.  Really.  It’s all on them.  He doesn’t care about worship style or length of service or any of that.  Couldn’t care less whether the demographic of the congregation skews old, young, rich, poor, black, white or plaid.  He’ll dress up if that’s what’s called for or wear jeans and a T if that’s the style.  He just wants a congregation who will accept him for who he is.

But they won’t.  As soon as they find out that Kenny is a liar, they immediately start to trying to change him.  They quote Old Testament Scriptures at him like “Thou shalt not bear false witness” even though they claim to be a New Testament church.  They quote NT verses to him about truthfulness and honesty, sometimes quite harshly.  Some of them are really mean about it.

Kenny has read many scholars, after all, who say that the New Testament has been mistranslated for almost two thousand years and verses like Ephesians 4:25 don’t actually mean that a person should never lie but that they shouldn’t be vicious in their lies.  And, as is obvious to anyone of a modern, enlightened, mind, John 7:18 is saying that Jesus never lies, not that any of us never do.  Of course, we all lie now and then, so it would be hypocritical to get on to someone who lies more frequently.

Kenny has also found scholars to tell him that John 8:44 was mistranslated in saying that Satan is the father of liars and of lies, though he can’t remember what those phrases actually mean in Greek.  And so what if Titus 1:2 says God never lies, it’s not like God is built in such a way to lie.  He doesn’t have the same urges or needs as we do.

So it has really galled Kenny when he’s attended church and been a part of ministry teams and taught Sunday school—and even played on the softball team side-by-side with the minister, for gosh sakes!—and then, as soon as he’s honest with them and tells them he’s a liar, they want to change him.  Some of them shout and call him names, which certainly didn’t make him want to worship with people like that!  But the worst ones are those that try to pretend they “love him in the Lord” and just want to help him overcome his sin.  Bunch of hypocrites.

The thing is, Kenny was born a liar.  When it comes to telling the truth or telling a lie, Kenny has no more control over his actions than a male dog has around a female dog in heat.  He just has to lie.  He was created that way and he is absolutely certain God wouldn’t create someone one way then tell them to be something else.  Being a liar is who he is and no one has any right at all to change him.

No, the ones who are even worse than that are the ones who have tried to reach out to him from a sense of their own brokenness.  That one church, he remembers with a wry chuckle, seemed like everyone in it was always telling him about the sins they were battling.  Lust, idolatry, covetousness, anger, you name it.  And then they’d try to tell Kenny that they would like to come alongside him in his journey and pray for the Holy Spirit to help him overcome the sin in his life.

Those people were the worst, because it was clear to Kenny that—ever since that day in college when he admitted to himself that he was a liar—such a peace had come over him that his status as a liar had to not be a sin, but a gift from God.  Why couldn’t all these Christians see that?  They claimed to want a revelation from God, but here was someone giving them a clear one and all they were doing was rebelling and clinging to their old-fashioned notions of Scriptural revelation.

Kenny’s thinking about heading into the city because he’s heard there’s a church there made up almost entirely of liars.  The preacher and his wife are self-proclaimed liars and so are all the elders and deacons.  You can walk right in, they say, and no one will think any the less of you if the way you signed in and the name you put on your nametag don’t match.  They’ll even applaud you for your boldness.

“That’s the way churches ought to be,” Kenny thinks to himself as he walks out of one more failure of a local church.  One more place where the people think they’re sinners in need of grace instead of realizing that God is nothing but love and doesn’t really care what you do so long as your heart’s in the right place.  Kenny, who lies to everyone but himself, knows this is true because his heart tells him so.

[P.S.  My apologies to everyone I know named Kenny.]