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Europeans came to the American wilderness looking for Eden, and Americans have been looking for it ever since. John Winthrop, one of the founding Puritans, framed it in terms of community. In his famous "City on a hill" speech, he describes the "city" he and his fellow voyagers are hoping to establish this way:

We must entertain each other in brotherly affection; we much be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others necessities; we must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience, and liberality. We must delight in each other, make others' conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together: always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, our community as members of the same body.

This lovely vision became clouded within a generation, and Puritan preachers soon lamented the "great and visible decay of the power of Godliness amongst many" (from "The Result of the 1679 General Synod"). Many an American preacher and writer since have repeated the lament, right up to our day. We mock the angry revivalist for his self-righteous condemnation of backslidden believers, but beneath the jeremiad, huddled in the corner of his breast, is a weeping child, wounded and weary with the church, that community in which he had put so much hope and only found disappointment.

Many wax eloquent about disappointment with God, just as many lament their disappointment with the church. At least one major book a year rehearses the lament. In 2007, there was unChristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks about Christianity … and Why It Matters, by Dave Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons. The following year, Washington Times writer Julia Duin gave us Quitting Church: Why the Faithful Are Fleeing and What to Do about It. Coming out shortly is Larry Crabb's Real Church: Does It Exist? Can I Find It?

These books detail the reasons why so many find the church disappointing, to the point that they are leaving in proverbial droves. While Puritan preachers castigated those departing the church, these modern jeremiads defend the departing and point an angry finger at the church. And with good reason: Anyone who has imbibed the New Testament's compelling vision of a Spirit-led church resonates deeply with Winthrop's description of Christian community. Such a vision gets planted deep in our breasts. So attracted are we to it that some are willing to leave a secure homeland and risk a hazardous journey across the face of the deep to be a part of it.

And so we enter door after church door, hoping to find a community where we can, in Winthop's apt phrase, "delight in each other." What we bump into time and again is just a building full of people. Some delight in each other all right, but to the point of excluding us. In other places, Winthop's words about "meekness, gentleness, patience, and liberality" are but antonyms of what we experience. There is "labor and suffering," though not "together" but instead against each other. The church, we discover too soon for our liking, is nothing but a house of sinners, a great and visible display of the "decay of the power of Godliness."

So we empathize with many who wander into the wilderness of faith without community. Some write about these lonely sojourners, while most of us just long for, in the words of Crabb, a church that stands out "as an alternative community that offers what everyone was created to enjoy." Or, as his title suggests, a "real church."

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March (Web-only) 2009, Vol. 53