Sinners Are the Church’s Business
Robert Capon, Alexander Maclaren, and the one thing the church keeps forgetting.
Only the late Robert Capon could grasp the heights of grace and the depths of flavor in a strawberry compote. His love of theology and cooking is likely an unparalleled tandem. And while some find his writing too provocative and personal convictions too liberal, I find him to strike the right notes that get comfortable pew-sitters to sit up and take notice of what this thing is really about. The “thing” being “the church and the Christian life.” What’s it about? What’s the point? While I don’t always follow Capon everywhere he goes, on the matter of who the church is for, he’s spot on.
Confessionally-minded folk will likely say that “the thing” is all about glorifying God and enjoying him forever,1 or something along those lines, which, of course, is undoubtedly true. But within that glorification and enjoyment, there is a vital truth that the church often forgets — namely, that this whole thing is about sinners being brought to Christ. Apropos to Capon and cooking, in a collection of his essays entitled More Theology & Less Heavy Cream: The Domestic Life of Pietro and Madeleine, in which he and his wife’s alter-egos enjoy a playful back-and-forth over cuisine, culture, marriage, and grace, Capon puts “the thing” in stark relief, writing, “A church that can’t manage to stay in communion with sinners makes about as much sense as a carpenter who can’t stand to handle wood.”2
Sinners are the church’s business (Mark 2:17; Luke 19:10). And while some might take that as a thesis for seeker-sensitive churches, that’s not exactly what I’m saying. Seeker-sensitive churches or, to use Jared C. Wilson’s terminology, “attractional”3 churches are often guilty of tweaking the message or the approach to the message of grace so that it comes across as more palatable to the less churchy crowd. Forgive my inner curmudgeon, but when the prelude to your Sunday morning service is little more than a Beyoncé cover, and your sermon is one in a series of Netflix tie-ins, what’s at stake is that you’ve subtly determined that “grace upon grace” can’t hold a room on its own. It needs an opening act.
But to say that “sinners are the church’s business” doesn’t mean adjusting the message. That’s sort of the point Capon makes throughout his writings, what with his customary emphasis on the grace that emanates from Jesus’s words and actions. From his parables to his person, grace is not merely what Jesus does; it’s who he is.
And the point is that Christ’s church, those who are meant to represent God’s Son and reflect his grace and truth, is never more herself than when she sits shoulder to shoulder with sinners. “The church,” Capon continues, “has to be told loud and clear that tossing out sinners is a violation of the Gospel of grace.”4 Instead of a museum of the pious, the church is a triage center for the walking wounded. And Capon wasn’t the first to make this assessment. One of my favorite orators, the Scottish Baptist Alexander Maclaren, who ministered more than a century before, preempts Capon with these striking lines:
A Christian church which does not imitate its Master in its frank and continual willingness to associate itself with the degraded and the outcast has lost one of the truest signs of its being vitalised with the life of Christ. There is much in this day in the condition of Christian communities to make men dissatisfied and fearful. But there is one thing which, though in all its developments one cannot sympathise with it, is in its essence wholly good, and that is the new and quickened consciousness that a church which does not address itself to the outcasts has no business to live; and that Christian people who are too proud of their righteousness to go amongst the unclean and the degraded are a great deal more of Pharisees than Christians, and have need to learn which be the first principles of the religion which they profess. Self-righteousness gathers up its skirts in holy horror; perfect righteousness goes cheerily and without fear amongst the outcasts, for where should the physician go but to the sick, and where should Christ be found but in the house of the publican?5
Maclaren’s diagnosis of the “holy horror” of the self-righteous and their spiritual skirts piercingly describes the church that’s too in love with its scruples to extend an invite to sinners to come inside. Lost in that holy shuffle is the fact that all of us, every last stinking one of us, were on the outside looking in. In other words, as soon as you start categorizing folks into clean and unclean, you turn a blind eye toward what’s true of everyone — namely, that grace is our lifeline.
Grace isn’t an announcement merely for the unchurched or the unregenerate. Grace is for sinners, and, as has often been pointed out, sinners are all that there are. This, to be sure, isn’t an abstract thing, nor is it just a warm sentiment the church keeps on tap like it does coffee in the foyer. Grace is a person with scars all over his body, which point toward his sacrificial self-surrender outside the camp so that sinners could be brought in (Heb. 13:12).
As such, for a church not to have room for sinners in its ranks is a sure sign that the church has lost the plot — the plot being grace for you, grace for all, grace upon grace. Despite how that may sound, this isn’t an overstatement. Grace, after all, is the one thing you can never exaggerate. As soon as you think you’ve pushed it too far, you’ve barely scratched the surface of how deep it goes.
Grace and peace to you.
Westminster Shorter Catechism, Q. 1.
Robert Capon, More Theology & Less Heavy Cream: The Domestic Life of Pietro and Madeleine (Charlottesville, VA: Mockingbird, 2016), 137.
See this discussed at length throughout Jared C. Wilson’s The Gospel-Driven Church: Uniting Church-Growth Dreams with the Metrics of Grace (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2019).
Capon, 137.
Alexander Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture, Vols. 1–17 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1944), 9:2.157–58.