ARTICLE: Kary Oberbrunner

The Girl Bashers

By Kary Oberbrunner, author of The Fine Line

Every guy knows the rule.

You can talk about someone's lack of athleticism, humor, or even intellect, but you never disrespect his girlfriend. A couple of years ago, I gave in. I broke the rule and badmouthed someone else's girl. I was sitting in a coffee shop with a few of my buddies, and we started talking about a guy we all knew. We liked him. A lot. He was our friend. But his girl annoyed the heck out of us, and the negativity started to fly.

Ripping on this girl felt good because it helped to separate us from her. After all, nobody wants to be associated with a loser. And we were clearly associated with her. She had been part of our lives since we were kids. Most of us had even fallen in love with her at one point or another. Maybe that's why we started throwing around the comments-we were insecure or hurt. I walked away from the coffee shop that night feeling pretty low. Although the conversation had been entertaining, I still felt convicted.

But the next week my buddies and I started to talk about our friend's girl again. Only this time it was more intense. Mild dislike soon devolved into hatred. We started telling stories about how this girl offended us. She didn't dress well or talk right. The music she liked was old and stuffy. But our main gripe was her looks. Put simply, she was as ugly as a dog. It was an ugliness that could be seen on the outside and the inside. Her entire look was outdated and irrelevant. She just didn't fit in, and none of us wanted to be around her. We were ashamed to admit that we even knew her, much less that we used to hang out with her.

This went on for several months. And then it got worse. More people knew this girl than I first thought. At parties on the weekends it almost became an opening line-talking about this girl. I met more people than I can remember just by communicating my dislike for her. I had the lines memorized and my timing perfect. People howled as I told story after story about how ridiculous this girl was.

Then I ran into her guy.

I didn't expect to see him. I just kind of bumped into him one day. As soon as I saw him, I realized how much I missed him. I didn't even remember the last time I'd seen him. But my delight quickly changed to deep embarrassment. I could hardly even look at him.

He stood and looked me in the eye. "Why, Kary?" he asked quietly. "How could you talk about her like that?"

I could sense how much he loved her, and he could sense how much I hated her. His question bored a hole right through me. Why did I hate her so much? What had she ever done to me? Suddenly all my well-rehearsed insults and petty gripes seemed pretty trivial.

I dropped to my knees-I couldn't help it. "Jesus," I said to this guy, "I'm sorry I spoke about your bride, the church like that."

Are you?

The Toxic Trend
Lots of people are bitter toward the Church. Pockets of disenchanted souls gather regularly to complain about how the church has disrespected them. Some of these offenses may have come in the form of legalism, religiosity, or condemnation. Other times it's because she didn't meet their needs exactly right.

Throughout history, the Church has been dressed in many different clothes. At times, she's relevant and beautiful, adorned in the finest, most elegant apparel. Other times she's in rags, strung out in the gutter of irrelevance.

But to my amazement, Jesus never loses passion for his bride-or for you and I for that matter. His Church holds a special place in his heart and it should in ours, too. Christians can't escape the Church, so we might as well reconcile. After all, when it comes down to it, we are the Church. Oftentimes we're just expressing our disapproval of ourselves.

Perhaps we can have such strong feelings against the Church because we approach it with divine expectations. We think that because it's the bride of Christ it should be perfect, just like Christ. But it's not because we're not. Yes, there are times when the Father's fingerprints seem to be all over the Church and we feel as though heaven and earth kiss-but a moment later that feeling disappears. Someone does something stupid that rocks us back to reality. Then the church becomes exactly what she is: a gathering of broken people in desperate need of healing.

The Church has an uncanny way of getting our hopes up and then leaving us disappointed. Many of us become tempted to avoid the ache rather then embrace it, and so we leave the Church and head to the Conformist camp in order to wallow in our wounds. We've been burned by the church and her Separatist tendencies, so it's easier to abandon the idea altogether, to express allegiance to culture rather than to the Church.

But do we have to choose between them?

Music artist Moby seems to think so:
In my own strange way, I'm a Christian, in that I really love Christ, and I think that the wisdom of Christ is the highest, strongest wisdom I've ever encountered, and I think that his description of the human condition is about the best description or understanding of the human condition I've ever encountered. And although I try and live my life according to the teachings of Christ, a lot of times I fall short. I wouldn't necessarily consider myself a Christian in the conventional sense of the word, where I go to church or believe in cultural Christianity, but I really do love Christ and recognize him in whatever capacity as I can understand it as God. One of my problems with the Church and conventional Christianity is it seems like their focus doesn't have much to do with the teachings of Christ, but rather with their own social agenda. So that's why I tend to be sort of outspoken about how much I dislike conventional cultural Christianity.

Moby raises some good points-some of which I completely agree with. But where does he predominantly go with his angst for the church? The same place Bono has ... outside the Church. But can people who claim to follow Christ simply walk out on the Church?

(article excerpted from The Fine Line by Kary Oberbrunner. Zondervan, January 2009. $14.99 ISBN: 0310285453 )