A Church Welcome

On the way home from work today, I started wondering what an honest Sunday morning worship welcome would sound like.  Here's my first draft:

Welcome to First Christian Church, we are two parts piety, one part generosity, and a dash of insanity though to be perfectly honest, depending on the Sunday, those ratios can be completely reversed.  We’d love to say that we accept everyone and we practice radical hospitality.  Truth is we have our limits.  We have our good days and our bad days.  Some of us are too wounded to trust.  Some of us are too angry to welcome.  We get grumpy, tired, anxious, and self-absorbed.  We are also gentle, kind, funny, and capable of loving. And if you catch us in the just the right light some people say we look like Saints—you know the good kind.  But that’s not really the point.  We are congregation of people and people have limits.  We cannot accept everyone.  We can only point to the Christ who accepts everyone. Christ knows everything about you and accepts you. The Spirit of God has given you incredible gifts.  We will do our best to honor the gifts God has placed in your life and not exploit them.  But, again, we're human so you know . . . And we won't excuse our faults saying, "Christians aren't perfect, just forgiven." We confess our sins to God and admit our mistakes to each other.  No excuses.  But, thanks be to God, forgiveness really is real.  We’ve known for a long time we are not the world’s Lord we forget sometimes we’re not its savior either.  We'll try to keep our place firmly in our sights.  We are imperfect signs pointing to a perfect God who is perfectly capable of holding each of us in amazing grace.  So, you’re welcome here but don’t expect perfection out of us and we won’t expect it of you.