Body Life

Body Life is about the church — not the church as it often is, but the church as it originally was; the church as it can be. And yes, the church as it must be again.

What sort of image does the word church bring to your mind? Does it suggest to you a snooty religious country club, bound by strange, almost secret rituals, traditions, and jargon? A political action group, waging war on behalf of a political agenda (of either the left or the right)? A waiting room, where people wait expectantly but rather passively for the next bus to heaven? A collection of hypocrites who care more about expensive pipe organs, stained glass, and stone buildings than they do about the hurting and hungry in the world? A place where religious junkies gather to get their weekend feel-good fix so they can get through another week? A collection of sanctimonious kill-joys who want to legislate morality for the rest of the world?

Let's be honest: The church has been all of these things at one time or another. Again and again, it has justified every bitter charge, every gripe and criticism that was ever leveled against it by angry atheists and disillusioned agnostics.

Yet despite all its obvious flaws, weaknesses, hypocrisies, sins, and excesses, the church has been the most powerful force for good on the face of the earth, century after century, from the time of the apostles right up to this present moment. It has been light in the midst of the blackest darkness. It has been salt — both a preservative and a delightful seasoning — in a corruption-prone, unsavory society.

A paradox? Absolutely! Many of the most wonderful truths of God come packaged in a paradox, wrapped in a mystery. As we unravel the seeming contradictions of God's church, as He designed it and created it to be, we will find some of the deepest, most exhilarating, and life-changing of all of God's truths — the truths of Body Life.