This is what we need right now, and no, I'm not being sarcastic.
We need to sit in church tonight or tomorrow and hear the story from Acts. We need to hear about frightened, confused apostles locked in a room. Locked. In a room. Afraid to go out and preach what they knew was true - what they knew about Jesus Christ, crucified, died, risen and alive. Forgiving, reconciling all to the Father. No more are we bound, defined and limited by the scourge of sin and death.
The apostles knew all of this. They had just spent days - weeks - with the risen Jesus, so they had no doubt.
But still. They still locked the door. They still huddled inside. Afraid of what the crowds in Jerusalem would do them if they heard, if they even saw the ones associated with the Nazorean.
But then the Spirit came and then...
God's Spirit came to those apostles and the first thing they did was go out into the messy, political, ordinary, crowded world and preach the Gospel of Christ....
...they stepped out blinking into the heat, and started preaching and getting questioned and bringing people to Jesus Christ. It was the birthday of the Church, complete with political hassles, astonishing triumphs, head-counting, crying, laughing, getting wet.
They went out. Empowered and filled with the Spirit they plunged into the world with the Good News.
This Situation is an awful mess, evidence of real rot and corruption. It is only going to get worse in the next months and perhaps years. But, we have to ask ourselves bluntly and forcefully, should that stop us from sharing Christ? Of course not, although one can see how that is definitely the intent of the ultimate source of all of this rot. To stop us in our tracks, turn us inward, cause us to doubt the truth of our faith, and absorb us with internal wranglings and distract us from the real need for the passionate, healing, forgiving love of Christ.
That doesn't diminish the need to talk about the Situation, to act on it, to pray about it and, with whatever power we have, to try to change things in our church so children are never victimized like this again. But we can do both at once, you know. We can tend to mending the hurt and the harm, and we can also continue to act lovingly in the name of Jesus. We have to. We must. Or else the rot will do nothing but spread, and like gangrene in a body, it will go to our core and threaten our very lives.
Here's the article from which that quotation was taken.
Here's a short article from Envoy on lay movements of the 20th century.