Labels

It is easy to do.  And, we are quick to do it.  Putting labels on people is about as easy as drawing a breath.  There is no place where this happens with such ease as in the church.  The church has more labels to stick on people than the old saying about Carter having liver pills.  Liberal, conservative, progressive, evangelical, and reformed are just a few on the longer list we could put together.  Our people labeling is a way of defining people and it is also a way of separating ourselves from one another.   

 

It seems strange that it would be so prevalent in the church when the One known as the Cornerstone of the church said, "Do not judge, so that you may not be judged."  (Matthew 7:1)   Of course, some may say that our labeling is not judging, but simply an act of defining, but the truth is that most of our labeling of others becomes a means of declaring that their value system is broken and false while ours is rock solid.  It ends up declaring their wrongness and affirming our rightness.  

This is how we end up with two neighboring churches with one bearing the name of "The Right Church" and the other, "The More Right Church."  What labels do very well is divide people.  They do not lead us toward reconciliation, but brokenness.  They create an "us and them" mentality which hardly seems like something Jesus would have had in mind when He went to the cross to shed His blood for all of us.