The objection usually comes from someone who has read more than their home church expected them to. They know the history. They have watched leaders fall. They can quote the passages the pulpit skipped. So the question is sharp and fair: why give your heart to an institution this visibly broken?
Travis Williams answers it by changing who the question is about. The church is not something you stand outside and grade. In his words, “we don’t go to church. We are the church.” If that is true, then every flaw you can name belongs to a body you are already part of. Loving the church does not mean pretending it is healthy. It means admitting you are inside the problem and taking your place in the repair.
The assumption hiding inside the complaint
Most criticism of the church carries a quiet premise: the church is them. The pastors, the deacons, the people who run the building, the tradition that formed you before you knew better. The critic speaks about it in the third person.
Williams noticed this in an unlikely place. He was listening to a song by a Christian artist that ended with a line to the effect that, whatever these pastors say, God loves you. It bothered him. He did not object to God’s love. He objected to the way the line cast the church’s own leaders as the obstacle to it. He began to hear the same hypercritical tone across Christian poetry and music, and he started asking why believers are so harsh toward what is, in the end, themselves.
That is the turn this whole argument depends on. Williams says he thinks critics “forget that I am this church.” A person can describe a stranger’s failures with detachment. It is much harder to describe your own body that way. The pronoun changes the posture.
Scripture puts it in the same terms. Paul writes to a quarreling congregation, “Now ye are the body of Christ, and members in particular” (1 Corinthians 12:27). He is not describing a building or a leadership team. He is telling ordinary, divided believers who they already are. The Corinthian church had real problems, and Paul names them throughout the letter. He names them as a member speaking to members.
How knowledge pushes people to the outside
The third-person habit often sets in right after someone gets serious about study. Lisa Fields is candid about her own version. When she first went deep into theology and read every scholar she could find, she says, she grew arrogant, because she had a great deal of information that had not yet worked its way through her life. She remembers how she regarded people she thought knew less than she did.
Williams describes the same season with an image: zeal is like fire, and “fire can burn a house down or warm a house.” The heat is real either way. What matters is whether it stays where it belongs.
He connects this to Paul’s warning: “Knowledge puffeth up, but charity edifieth” (1 Corinthians 8:1). In context, Paul is answering Corinthians who knew correct things about idols and used that knowledge carelessly, wounding weaker believers. Knowledge was not the problem. Knowledge without love inflated the one who held it.
That inflation is exactly what produces the outsider’s stance. Once you believe you understand the church better than the church understands itself, you start speaking about it rather than as part of it. Your correct observations make you bigger and leave the congregation no better. Williams names the missing piece with a definition: “wisdom is knowledge applied.” Fields gives the test: “you don’t really know something until you’ve lived it.” Knowledge kept in the head lets you stay in the stands. Knowledge put into practice puts you back among the people.
What changes when you count yourself in
Once the church becomes we, a few things follow almost on their own.
First, you stop exempting yourself. Fields puts it bluntly: even if you see something wrong in your congregation, “You have to come in thinking that there’s something wrong with you too.” Her reasoning is simple. Gather a crowd of imperfect people and you will get imperfection. In her words, “the church is made up of imperfect people that are striving to be like a perfect Christ.” The critic who forgets this expects the church to be the one place exempt from the condition of everyone in it, including the critic.
Second, difference stops looking like failure. Fields picks up Paul’s body imagery. You might be a leg looking at a lot of arms, she says, and conclude that they are weak where you are strong, so you have to set them straight. Paul writes against exactly that instinct: “And the eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee: nor again the head to the feet, I have no need of you” (1 Corinthians 12:21). Some of what the educated critic reads as the church’s deficiency is a different member doing a different job.
Third, contempt for the church starts to look incoherent. Williams points to Paul’s teaching that no man hates his own body. The KJV reads, “For no man ever yet hated his own flesh; but nourisheth and cherisheth it, even as the Lord the church” (Ephesians 5:29). A few verses earlier, husbands are to love their wives “even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it” (Ephesians 5:25). Fields makes the point with an analogy. Imagine her telling Williams’s wife that she would do anything for her, while dismissing Williams himself in the same breath. Nobody would take that as love for his wife. Yet many believers effectively tell Jesus they are fine with him while despising the body he gave himself for.
Fourth, your hope stops being private. Williams says Christ is returning for his church: “He’s not coming back for individuals.” The same passage in Ephesians says why Christ gave himself: “That he might present it to himself a glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing; but that it should be holy and without blemish” (Ephesians 5:27). Notice the order. The spots and wrinkles are real now, and Christ’s answer to them is not to abandon the church but to finish it. Your future is bound up with the same people whose flaws you can list. Detachment from them is detachment from the thing you are hoping for. And the spotless church you want is not something the critic produces by pointing. It is something Christ is completing in the people he already claims.
Doesn’t this just silence legitimate criticism?
This is the strongest objection, and it deserves a real answer. If “you are the church” becomes a way to shut down anyone who names a problem, it protects the institution at the expense of truth. Some churches have used belonging language that way.
Williams and Fields are not arguing for silence. Fields says plainly that public critique can bring awareness, as long as it is done in a loving way. Her objection is to a particular stance: the zealous person outside, trying to change something while keeping it at a distance. “In order to bring change to something you must work with what you’re trying to bring about change,” she says. A friend once confronted her during a stretch when she was constantly posting about what the Black church needed to fix. The friend asked how she expected to reach the Black church while spending her time throwing shade at it online. Fields says that question changed how she spoke about the church. Her summary is direct: “if you wanna help, then really help.”
The book of Acts shows what that looks like. Williams points to Acts 6, which he reads as an early case of prejudice inside the church. The text describes “a murmuring of the Grecians against the Hebrews, because their widows were neglected in the daily ministration” (Acts 6:1). The tension was between Greek-speaking and Hebrew-speaking Jewish believers, a cultural and linguistic fault line. Interpreters can debate how far to call it prejudice. Either way, the complaint was real, and the apostles did not dismiss it. They told the congregation, “look ye out among you seven men of honest report, full of the Holy Ghost and wisdom, whom we may appoint over this business” (Acts 6:3). The names in verse 5 are Greek names, which suggests the solution included people from the community that had been overlooked.
Williams draws the lesson from the people who were chosen. They were already present, already involved, and available when leaders asked who could take on the problem. Criticism became repair because the critics were members. Someone shouting from outside could not have been appointed.
One distinction keeps this argument honest. Being in a flawed body is different from being harmed by it. When leaders abuse their trust, that is a real and grievous wrong, and it is not the same as the failure of Christ. Nothing here asks a wounded person to treat that harm as a shared flaw or to hurry back into an unsafe room. The argument is aimed at the posture of the critic who has never stepped inside, not at the person who was hurt there.
Where the critic actually stands
If you are the church, the next question is which part of it you are in. When people voice strong opinions about the church, Williams wants to ask them a few things: “Are you involved in a local church? Are you active in a local body? Are you serving anybody or are you submitted to anyone?” Some of the change you want, he says, may depend on your being present to propose it. The problems have always been there, “and we’re a part of the solution.”
Fields states the conclusion for anyone who wants to defend Christianity: “you can’t really be a defender of the faith apart from a local church.” Williams adds a point educated readers often miss. The letters we quote to correct the church were written to local churches, to bodies of believers who met and lived together under leaders. Reading those letters while keeping your distance from any actual congregation means reading them against their own setting.
Membership also corrects the critic’s isolation. Williams warns against young believers who work out theology only with friends saved the same year, building their own conclusions over coffee. “God has created us for each other,” he says. The young need the experience of older believers, and the older need the energy of the young. Fields says lessons from church mothers and older believers have enriched her life more than any books.
The question, asked again
Williams is not naive about the church’s record. Acts shows trouble almost from the start. He still insists that “The church of Jesus Christ is alive and well on planet earth,” because people are still passing from death to life. His plea is to “fall back in love with the church,” and he knows that means “we need to get our hands dirty.”
Seen this way, the original question does not survive intact. Why should I love something this flawed? assumes the flaws belong to someone else. Once you count yourself as a member, the flaws include yours, the hope includes yours, and the repair needs yours. The question that remains is not whether this body deserves your heart. It is what this body needs from the part of it that you are.