Grateful for the Church. Confused by the Fruit.

love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness

The promise was simple: Jesus will make your life better, and make you better at life.

That’s not untrue. I want to say that before I say anything more complicated.

The church promised community. Belonging. People who show up. And they did—genuinely, repeatedly, at real cost to themselves. I watched people sacrifice time and comfort and sleep for me and others, and they did it because they believed it mattered, and it did matter, and I am not going to flatten that into something smaller than it was just because the story got complicated later.

And there was transformation. I was in church my whole life. In my early years marked by loneliness, not quite fitting at school or in the world, I found refuge there. Found mentors, purpose, and acceptance. And I eventually found real friendship. For a lonely kid, that was the world. And slowly, over years, I found a sense of my own worth. I’m a self-assured person now. I genuinely like who I am. That wouldn’t have happened for me without my church.

There’s a saying—I don’t know who said it first—that the church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints.

That’s true, comforting, and welcoming. We’re all on the same playing field. Just trying our best.

But here’s the thing: people in a hospital get better.

What I kept watching was people getting stable and then just staying there. Not worse, mostly. But not better either. I wouldn’t call it transformation. The same struggles cycling through the same small groups year after year. Some of them sliding. Some of them doing outright terrible things—even some of the senior Christian leaders I know. I kept waiting for the fruit that was supposed to be obvious. The changed lives that were supposed to be unmistakable.

And then something changed. Looking outside the church, I started seeing the unmistakable fruit I’d been told should be easiest to find inside.

And at the same time, looking inside, I started noticing the inverse: not just “imperfect people,” but something thinning out—something withering—in places I expected to feel most alive.

It was unsettling: the diagnostic tool I trusted stopped matching reality.

It wasn’t just strangers or headlines. It was people close to me, too. People who took Christianity seriously—its practices, its formation, its teaching—becoming harder to recognize. Not cartoon villains. But compromised. Thinner. Less gentle. Less compassionate. Less curious. Less connected.

And yet my neighbor who has never set foot in a church, is the one who shows up every time someone on the block needs something. The friend who walked away from faith in college and somehow built a life of more genuine presence and care than most of the Christian leaders I’ve known. Communities forming around people loving each other with everything they have.

Here’s something I’ve come to believe: for most people a lot of the best people they know aren’t Christians. Some of the most visible Christians are often some of the worst people they know. And in their own lives, the most generous, most present, most genuinely good people they can point to—a lot of them have nothing to do with church at all.

Fruit is everywhere outside the Church—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness—the whole list.

I don’t know what to do with that. But I keep sitting with it.