A couple of weeks before I began work as pastor of a medium-sized church in the suburbs of Charlotte, the lay leader called me to say “We’ve organized a bunch of meetings in people’s homes during your first month. You can meet everybody, and we’ve asked everyone to be ready to tell you what’s wrong with our church.” I moaned, and asked if we could shift the topic to What do I love about this church? or How have I been blessed by this Church?

Of course, while it’s far healthier to focus on and celebrate the abundant good that a church is for us, there is something, and sometimes much wrong with the Church, every church, just as the people in the church are broken and sinful and in need of healing. Some of the church’s lunacy is embarrassingly obvious: infighting or a chilly attitude to outsiders or smugly passing judgment, or baptizing a political ideology or that nagging nemesis “We’ve never done it that way.” We all know gripers, whose griping about the Church is precisely what’s wrong with the Church.

Nowadays, we have the patently ridiculous Christian Nationalism pretending to be Church, and the popular congregations that merely entertain and pander to their audiences. More often, it’s subtle, a blind spot, a failure of nerve or just being chicken, playing it safe, not catching up to the times.

At the end of October each year, we recall and celebrate Martin Luther’s bold nailing of his famous 95 theses that sparked the Reformation. But it’s never just the Reformation. The Church always, in every age and place is in dire need of Reformation. We never wallow in What’s wrong with our church. But we do always pray “Lord, search us and test us, and see if there is anything wayward in us” (Psalm 139:23). We celebrate all the good God has done in and through us, but we never rest on our laurels; we always know we are only achieving a fraction of what God needs from us, and we’re likely veering into some dumb stuff we don’t yet perceive as dumb.

How do we nose out what needs Reformation? You go to the doctor for a physical – not when you’re sick, but when you’re healthy, to stay healthy. When you do so, they test your blood or listen to your heart or take an x-ray; the doctor asks you a lot of personal questions, and she reviews your family history; you get some counsel on a better diet or more exercise. Maybe a Church welcomes and expects the pastor to be the diagnostician. Do we want sermons that curtsy to our preconceived notions? Or do we eagerly receive words that question us lovingly and push us out of our comfort zone?

Are we carefully reading and listening to Scripture? Reading anything about what cutting edge churches might be up to? Are we attentive to the world, the culture, our own neighborhood? Dare we find unchurched neighbors and ask them what they see in us, or what the need from us – or even how we might pray for and serve them? What does our heart sound like to outsiders? How are we getting flabby? What exercises and habits will keep us on God’s right track for us?

The Church forever being re-formed lifts up stories of joyful reformers who show us a better way. St. Francis of Assisi had no new revelation from God about anything. He simply lived out what had always been plain as day in Scripture. Dorothy Day was bored and even annoyed by the Church in her day that was rigid or apathetic – but re-entered the Church she’d abandoned, determined to be a change agent. Years ago, our church had a homeless man, Michael Norton, who began attending, got involved, and was elected to our Board. He loved us, and he lovingly asked so many hard questions, and helped us understand what we thought we understood about the world but were terribly mistaken because we didn’t really know the people we assumed we were helping.

Tomorrow is Reformation day – like every day for God’s Church.