By what measure – in general – can we say the church has succeeded or failed?

I think about that question a lot, and I think it is impossible to answer definitively. Typical answers include measuring attendance or membership, looking at budgets or buildings, examining the vitality of programs and outreach.

But somehow those measurements fail to get at the idea of “faithfulness.” If you think about it, the church is not called to “succeed” or to “grow” or to “expand” like an empire or a business or a disease. It is called to faithfully follow Jesus. Jesus teaches us that we will be known by our love for each other – not our big buildings, not our media campaigns, not our large worship services. Our love.

In that light, a recent sign of real failure has emerged. This survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life shows that people who attend church more often are more likely to think that torture is either often or sometimes justified.

This is despite the fact that every mainline church body I know of has publically opposed the use of torture. Futhermore, it is hard to find a moment in scripture when Jesus infers some kind of support of torture. If we are to be known by our love and are to give our lives for others and love even our enemies, then the torture of another human being would be in the category of “things that are incompatible with Christian teaching.”

If the church has failed to communicate such a basic value to its own membership, how on earth can anyone take the church seriously? We are failing because we are not faithful. We are failing because we are not authentic. All those other measures of success seem irrelevant when you consider this monumental failure.