Perception is Not Reality

Well... We’ve all heard that it is.  But perception is only reality for one person, the person that has it.  But the rest of us all have differing perceptions.  Reality only begins when our perceptions line up with facts, and we agree with those facts, and each other.

There is a very popular perception about the Church.  A lot of people believe that the Church has nothing to say to them because of all the divisions and factions in the Church.

For example: Christians are always preaching about forgiveness, but if they really believed in forgiveness, there wouldn’t be thirty thousand or more denominations, would there?

We have to agree.  Until 1054 AD there was only one denomination, although there was one major dissenting group, and several splinters.  But the Church worked very hard to reconcile those splinters, and correct false perceptions.  Not so today.  Today’s perception is that the Church doesn’t work at fixing splinters.  The reality is that some of the thirty thousand or more denominations don’t get along at all, they are badly, even violently divided over all sorts of issues.  The perception is that the Church is a bad joke, it has nothing to say to me.

There are no divisions in the Church in Heaven, no denominations, no arguments about doctrine.  Don’t get me wrong.  Arguments about doctrine are a good thing, if at the end of the day, we shake hands, share the peace of the Lord; but remain inseparable loving Christian brothers and sisters.  The Scripture commands that we, “Speak the same things.”  But getting there takes a lot of hard work, and just buckling to every disagreement produces a dishonest peace.  But if we can love and respect each other, and argue quietly, we can eventually work out a resolution.  Unless, of course, we’re too proud to even say, “I might have been wrong.”