When Christian believers gather in churches, everything that can go wrong soon or later does. Outsiders, on observing this, conclude that there is nothing to the religion business except, perhaps, business - and dishonest business at that. Insiders see it differently. Just as a hospital collects the sick under one roof and labels them as such, the church collects sinners. Many of the people outside the hospital are every bit as sick as the ones inside, but their illnesses are either undiagnosed or disguised. It's similar with sinners outside the church.
So Christian churches are not, as a rule, model communities of good behaviour. They are, rather, places where human misbehavior is brought out into the open, faced and dealt with.
Eugene Peterson, author of "The Message" translation.
