Church! Stop:
1. Being judgmental
2. Being petty
3. Being hypocritical, and
4. Gossiping.
I think these are the four biggest problems within the church today. People in general are so self-centered, even church and God become about them. But we're not on the earth because of us, or even because of some ominous, distant presence called The Universe. We're here because of one thing and one alone: God and His purposes. The Church needs to stop trying to make Christianity about declaring their perfection (and incontestable superiority) to the world. To me, Christianity is about nearly the exact opposite. It's declaring to the world that we're scum, and it's okay. Because no matter how far we fall, how many drugs we take, and how many dark alleyways we traverse, God will always be holding out is hand to pull us back up.
I kinda want to expand on these problems a little. I feel like anyone who's stepped into a church for even a short while knows what I'm talking about at least a bit, though probably more from experiences outside of the church rather than in one. Obviously, not every Christian is like this, and I'd like to think a precious few have major problems with all four of these flaws. But they remain a gigantic problem within the Church nonetheless.
Clearly, everyone's judgmental to some degree or another, whether it's to the degree that we judge people largely on their appearance or more severe things like drug use (which still isn't a facet of someone's personality, by the way). In any case, the hypocrisy some Christians harbor figures in a lot with how the severity with which they judge people.
As I've said before, we all stink. There's no getting around that. So since we all stink, why do we feel such a need to nitpick at others? Especially for a Christian that's supposedly acknowledged that we all stink! Everyone makes their own mistakes, but we all make mistakes. Whether you've personally messed up in the specific way you see someone else messing up or not (and it's frequently debatable whether a "mistake" is, in actuality, really a mistake), you have made mistakes.
Often, too, people are more severe on other people than they are on themselves. We can, after all, see our own reasoning for doing a thing, but not someone else's. While we may stare down at the cat we just hit with our car thinking, "Gosh, it may have been right in front of my car, but I just didn't see it." others may look at the scene from a distance and say to themselves, "That cat was right in front of them! They've always hated that cat, and now they've taken it upon themselves to get revenge!" It's the same with anything we do: whether good or bad. That's why it's so incredibly unfair to make calls on why someone does something and how bad it makes them.
