Hat Tip to Joe Carter and Evangelical Outpost for typing out part of a print interview with the Eugene Peterson. Of course, it’s about the church.

What other church is there besides institutional? There’s nobody who doesn’t have problems with the church, because there’s sin in the church. But there’s no other place to be a Christian except the church. There’s sin in the local bank. There’s sin in the grocery stores. I really don’t understand this naà¹?ve criticism of the institution. I really don’t get it.

Frederick von Hugel said the institution of the church is like the bark on the tree. There’s no life in the bark. It’s dead wood. But it protects the life of the tree within. And the tree grows and grows and grows and grows. If you take the bark off, it’s prone to disease dehydration, death.

So, yes, the church is dead but it protects something alive. And when you try to have a church without bark, it doesn’t last long. It disappears, gets sick, and it’s prone to all kinds of disease, heresy, and narcissism.

In my writing, I hope to recover a sense of the reality of congregation – what it is. It’s a gift of the Holy Spirit. Why are we always idealizing what the Holy Spirit doesn’t idealize? There’s no idealization of the church in the Bible – none. We’ve got two thousand years of history now. Why are we so dumb?

The idealistic battering of the church that you have to listen to these days needs to be pointed out. I used to believe the church could be “renewed” and remade. Then I wound up in a ball, in a corner, crying like a baby.

Now I am like Yaconelli. The church is a zoo, and that’s why a chimp like me can actually be part of it.