You Can't Love Jesus and Despise His Bride
Contending for Change Without Losing Love for the Body
Let me be unambiguous about where I stand. I am a full-blown advocate for reformation in the church today. No apologies for that.
The church in much of the Western world has drifted. We’ve traded the apostolic for the institutional, the prophetic for the professional, and the presence of God for polished production. We’ve built empires around personalities, handed discipleship over to programmes, and confused numerical growth with Kingdom advance. The fivefold ministry has been flattened; the saints have been spectated rather than equipped. And in too many places, the mission has been reduced to keeping people comfortable and the doors open.
But the cost of that drift is not abstract. It is measured in the faces of people who came to the church hungry and left empty. It is measured in the generations who walked away not because they rejected Jesus but because what they encountered in his name bore so little resemblance to the Jesus of the Gospels that they could not reconcile the two. It is measured in believers who sat in pews for decades, never once equipped or released or called into anything beyond passive consumption. It is measured in leaders who burned out carrying a model that was never meant to rest on one person’s shoulders. The drift has a human cost; and that cost is one the Western church has largely refused to reckon with honestly.
These things are not in need of a gentle course correction. They represent a systemic departure from the New Testament pattern and they need to be torn down and rebuilt. I will say that loudly, repeatedly, and without apology from every platform I’m given.
But here’s where I part ways with a certain stream of reformers.
The moment someone begins throwing mud on the bride of Christ, I’m out. Reformation is not ridicule; correction is not contempt. There is a spirit that masquerades as prophetic boldness but is really just unresolved offence dressed in reformation language. I’ve seen it. It tears down without building; it diagnoses without love. It gathers an audience by stoking cynicism toward the very body Jesus died for.
That’s not reformation; that’s demolition dressed in doctrine.
To the church at Ephesus Jesus said something that should stop every reformer in their tracks. He commended them for their doctrinal precision, their intolerance of false teaching, their tireless labour, their refusal to compromise. By every external measure they were doing everything right. And then he said:
I have this against you, that you have abandoned the love you had at first. — Revelation 2:4
Not that they had abandoned the truth. Not that they had softened their convictions. They had simply lost love. And Jesus called it a fall. He told them to repent.
This is worth sitting with. Ephesus was not a liberal church. It was not a compromised church. It was theologically rigorous, missionally active, and doctrinally sound. It had tested false apostles and found them wanting. It had endured hardship without growing weary. By the standards of most reformation discourse today, Ephesus would have been held up as a model. And yet Jesus looked at all of that and said: you have fallen. The absence of love was not a minor shortcoming to be noted and moved on from. It was a categorical failure that required repentance and a return to first works.
That is a sobering word for anyone who has built a platform on the failures of the church. You can be right about everything and still be in the condition Jesus is warning against. Doctrinal precision without love is not reformation; it is just a more sophisticated version of what Ephesus had become. And Jesus is no more impressed by it today than he was then.
It is entirely possible to be theologically correct about everything that is wrong with the church and still be in the same condition as Ephesus. Right about the diagnosis; wrong in the spirit. Accurate in the critique; absent in the love. That combination is not reformation. It is just Ephesus with a podcast.
The Spirit of the Reformer Matters
There is a type of Christian voice that has grown loud in our day. It speaks the language of reformation; it identifies real problems, names real failures, and calls for real change. So far, so good. But somewhere along the way the diagnosis curdles into contempt. The church is not just broken, she is beyond repair; the institution is not just flawed, it is the enemy. And the person speaking has subtly repositioned themselves outside the body, gathering an audience not around a vision of what the church could become but around a shared disdain for what she currently is.
That is not the spirit of a reformer; that is the spirit of a critic who has given up.
The apostle Paul is the most compelling example in all of Scripture of what it looks like to hold fierce prophetic critique and deep pastoral love in the same hand.
His letters to Corinth alone should settle the question. This was a church riddled with division, sexual immorality, doctrinal confusion, abuse of the Lord’s table, and a charismatic culture that had become more about self-display than edification. Paul named every one of those things without flinching. He did not soften the diagnosis to protect people’s feelings; he did not avoid the hard conversations to preserve his popularity. He said what needed to be said with surgical precision and apostolic authority.
And yet underneath every word of correction was a love that is almost overwhelming in its intensity. He called them his joy and his crown (Philippians 4:1). He wrote that out of much affliction and anguish of heart he wrote to them with many tears, not to cause them pain but to let them know the abundant love he had for them (2 Corinthians 2:4). He described the daily pressure on him of his anxiety for all the churches (2 Corinthians 11:28). He was not detached; he was not above them. He was broken for them.
That is the model. Not a critic who has built a platform on the failures of the church; a father who is in anguish over the gap between what his children are and what they are called to be, and who refuses to stop fighting for them.
In the twentieth century, a South African Pentecostal named David du Plessis did something that cost him almost everything in his own community. Rather than writing off the mainline denominations as dead and beyond hope, he walked into them. He sat with Catholics; he engaged with Lutherans and Anglicans and Presbyterians. He brought the fire of the Spirit into rooms that had not seen it in generations, and he did it not with contempt for what those traditions were but with love for what they could become.
His own Pentecostal community was not always kind about it. He was criticised for giving credibility to compromised institutions; he was accused of being naive at best and compromised at worst. He lost his ministerial credentials with the Assemblies of God for a period because of his ecumenical engagement.
He kept going anyway. Not because he was blind to the failures of the institutional church; he saw them clearly. But he carried a conviction that you cannot write off what Jesus has not written off, and that love for the broader body is not weakness. It is obedience.
He became known as Mr Pentecost. Not because he separated himself from the compromised and gathered the pure; but because he loved the whole church enough to bring her what she was missing.
That brokenness is entirely different from the cynicism that drives so much online reformation discourse today.
Brokenness builds. Cynicism just burns.
New Movements Are Necessary. Contempt Is Not.
Let me say something that might surprise you given everything above. I believe new movements are necessary. I believe God raises up new wineskins because old ones sometimes cannot contain what the Spirit is doing. I have given my life to one. I make no apology for that.
The issue is never whether something new is needed. The issue is the spirit in which it is born.
There is a vast difference between a movement that emerges from a burden and a movement that emerges from bitterness. One is pulled forward by a vision of what the church could become; the other is pushed forward by disgust at what she currently is. Jesus noted in the parable of the wheat and tares that the two can look identical in the early stages of growth. The difference only becomes apparent as they mature. A burden and a bitterness can wear the same face in the beginning; the difference only becomes clear over time in the fruit they bear and the collateral damage they leave behind.
New movements born from genuine apostolic burden tend to honour what God has done in previous generations even while pressing beyond it. They plant without poisoning; they build without burning down what others have built. They carry a spirit of sonship toward the broader body even when they are doing something the broader body does not yet understand or recognise.
Movements born from bitterness do the opposite. They define themselves primarily by what they are against; their identity is constructed around the failures of the institutional church rather than the fullness of the Kingdom vision they are pursuing. And that root of bitterness, however justified it feels in the beginning, defiles everything it touches.
See to it that no root of bitterness springs up and causes trouble, and by it many become defiled. — Hebrews 12:15
You can leave a church without despising her; you can plant something new without smashing what already exists. You can carry a reformation mandate without carrying an offence. The question is not whether you build something new. The question is what is in your heart when you do.
She Is Still the Bride
Step back from the institution for a moment. Step back from the arguments and the frustrations and the very real failures that have been named in this article. And look at what Jesus sees when he looks at the church.
He sees his bride.
Not the idealised, cleaned-up version of her. Not the triumphant, spotless version she will one day be at his return. This version. The version that exists right now in all her messiness and inconsistency and occasional embarrassment. The version that has made mistakes and failed people and built things that needed to be rebuilt. The version that has sometimes looked more like the world than the Kingdom.
He loves her anyway. Deeply, fiercely, unwaveringly. He gave everything for her. Not as a transaction but as an act of love so total that Paul reaches for the language of marriage to even begin to describe it. Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her (Ephesians 5:25). He is right now interceding for her at the right hand of the Father. He is sanctifying her; He is cleansing her; He is preparing her for the day when she will stand before him without spot or wrinkle or any such thing. He has not written her off. He has not decided she is too far gone. He has not given up on her, and neither will I.
If that is how Jesus sees the church then the question every reformer must answer is this: how dare we see her differently? How dare we speak of her with contempt when he speaks of her with love? How dare we gather audiences around our disdain for her when he gave his life for her?
You cannot claim to love the Head while despising the body; you cannot declare allegiance to the Father while treating His family as something to be discarded or sneered at. Paul understood that; Du Plessis understood that. The great cloud of witnesses who loved the church at great personal cost understood that. We need to recover it.
So Where Does That Leave Us?
It leaves us with a high and difficult calling. To see clearly without becoming cynical; to speak boldly without becoming cruel. To contend for change without losing love for the thing we are contending for.
Yes, I will push for change. I will name what needs to be named. I will contend for the apostolic, the prophetic, the fullness of what the Spirit is restoring in this hour. I will not soften the critique where critique is needed.
But I will do it on my knees. With tears if necessary. As someone who loves what Jesus loves.
Reform must be done in the right spirit or it isn’t reform at all. It’s just another wound on the body.
If you want to keep thinking through these things together, here is where that conversation continues. Subscribe to Awake Nations on Substack for reformation without cynicism, apostolic thinking rooted in love for the church, and content that takes both the Word and church history seriously. This is not a spectator space. It’s for those who are building.
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