“Going to church,” said my friend. “It just seems so hypocritical. I mean, the people who attend regularly aren’t any better than the rest of us. I guess I’ve always felt it’s more honest to admit that I’m not a Christian – not that I think I’m particularly evil, but I’m no saint, either. The only difference between me and the people in Sunday School is that I don’t pretend to be a Christian. I don’t pretend to be any better than I am.”

“Hypocrisy really isn’t very pretty, is it?” I agreed. “Dressing it up and sending it to church doesn’t make it any more attractive. It kind of makes you wonder: why is it that religious people have such a reputation for being hypocrites?”

“I guess it’s because they really believe they’re better than everyone else. Even though they get just as angry as anyone, just as petty, just as stuck-up, just as spiteful, they still think they’re better – that they’re Christian – just because they spend an hour a week in church.”

“I’ve always thought,” I said, “that the thing that would be really convincing would be to see an authentic change in their character. If you’re going to claim to be a Christian, you ought to live like one more often than that one hour on Sunday morning.”

“That’s right.”

“But it seems to me that you’re also suggesting that living as a Christian would be a good thing to do. It’s sad that some people talk as if they’re Christians when they don’t live that way; but at the same time it would be a very fine thing indeed if they and you and I and all the rest of us did live that way.”

“Sure,” he said. “It would be great. But we don’t. So why pretend?”

“One of the things that has always impressed me about Jesus was that there wasn’t any pretense or phoniness about him. You’re right, of course, that I don’t do as good a job of following his example as I should.”

“I didn’t mean you personally, you know,” he said quickly.

“Well, thanks,” I said, “though if you did you wouldn’t be mistaken. But about Jesus. What I’d call the authenticity of his life – the genuineness of his love, his message, his interaction with all sorts of people, his self-sacrifice – all of that has made its mark on my way of looking at things. I’m convinced that he is the model of what it means to be truly human. If following the example of Jesus is what you have in mind when you speak of being a Christian, then I want to be one.”

“When you put it that way, maybe I do, too.”

“The funny thing about it is, most church people do, too.”

“Well, they have some strange ways of showing it, he said.”

“Yeah, we do,” I admitted. Neither of us spoke for a moment. I don’t know what my friend was thinking; for my part, I was mulling over some of the ways I had failed to live out my own desire to live as a follower of Christ.

“Any church you look at,” I said, “is going to have its faults. And any church will probably have a number of individuals you personally don’t like. But you’ll also find people who are struggling to live out what it means to be a Christian. They’ll stumble a lot in the process, but because they think learning how to follow Jesus Christ is so important, they’ll keep working at it.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe this whole ‘follower of Jesus’ business is too much work.”

“Maybe it is,” I conceded. “But I don’t think so. Isn’t it interesting, though, how the conversation comes round in a circle? At the beginning, you were upset because the people who say they want to live like Christians don’t work at it thoroughly enough. Now you’ve said that it really would be a good thing if everybody lived that way. You even suggested it would be a good thing if you yourself lived that way. But it might be too demanding, so maybe you won’t try after all.”

“Huh,” he said. “I’ve kind of gotten myself hooked by my own words, haven’t I?”

“Well, you said at the beginning that the difference between the people in church on Sunday morning and yourself is that they are pretending to be Christian, and you aren’t. The cheap argument at this point would be to say that the real difference is that they’re trying and sometimes failing, while you aren’t actually trying. But I’m not going to go that way. Instead, I’ll suggest that maybe learning to be a follower of Jesus matters to you more than you’ve admitted to yourself. And I’ll even suggest that some of the clumsy or even hypocritical mistakes others have made may have taught them some things: giving them some insights they could tell you about that might be just the help you need. Maybe it’s time to check it out.”