Who’d write a dictionary, eh? It’s a fascinating job, I’m sure, but depressingly interminable. By the time you get to define the zeitgeist, the nature of abhorrence has changed. You go back to the beginning, only for the discipline of zoology to shift focus. It’s a life spent chasing the chimera of closure, the literary equivalent of painting the ForthBridge.

My Shorter Oxford English Dictionary is a good example. It was published in 1973, and revised twenty years later, but it’s already woefully out of date. Take the way it defines ‘Church’ for example: ‘a particular organised Christian society, distinguished by special features of doctrine, worship, etc or confined to territorial or historic limits’, ‘a congregation of Christians locally organised into a society for religious worship’, ‘the ecclesiastical and clerical organisation of Christian society; the clergy and officers collectively, or as a corporation…’ and so on.

There’s nothing wrong with these definitions, of course, but they are simply not enough. If dictionaries wish to record how words actually are used, as opposed to how the authorities think they should be used, where are the real definitions? Where is ‘a collection of reactionary bigots committed to resisting any progress and, wherever possible, turning the clock back to the 13^th century’? Where is ‘a herd of witless inadequates that gathers together every week to sing songs to their imaginary friend’? Where is there any mention of corruption, of homophobia, of paedophilia? Surely, it could at least have at mentioned ‘a mausoleum of extinct culture, relevant only to local historians and enthusiasts of historical architecture’?

This is all too cynical, surely? The British may no longer attend church in any great numbers (although the best historical data suggest that haven’t done so for several centuries), but they do, at least, retain some affection for the church, at least the established one.

Well, yes and no. There is certainly some warmth and affection for local, parish churches and their clergy, even for their congregations, but the Church, in the abstract, fares rather less well. When interviewing non-Christians a number of years ago for Beyond Belief?, a project set up and run by the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity, I was taken aback by the sheer vitriol levelled at ‘the Church’.

There was the usual (and let’s be honest, often justifiable) criticisms. ‘It’s cold… it’s long… and it’s not very inviting.’ The language is arcane, the sermon patronising, the format inflexible. In a world now shaped by consumerism, the church was still stuck in the past. ‘The church should reflect what we want,’ one woman in her thirties told me. ‘[It] should not dictate to us that you can get married, you can’t get married. We want to get married. We are consumers of the Church.’

And then there was the venom. Church was an exercise in fleecing the poor and controlling the masses. It was completely irrelevant, preaching an antiquated and pernicious morality. The (abstract) Christians who attended services were ‘patronising… desperate for support… colourless… begging for money… misfits… goody two shoes… holier than thou.’ ‘They are very self-centred,’ one young woman told me. ‘They just want to talk about themselves and they are on about religion all the time and they are rarely interested in other people.’

Interestingly, the same people who had so enthusiastically savaged abstract Christians, often spoke positively of actual Christians – people with whom they worked, played sport, lived besides; people whose names they knew. The reality, was usually (although not always) better than the image.

Still, it was the image that mattered. There were good Christians but they were exception: small-c Christians, decent enough people, morally admirable even, but different from the real, big-C Christians who sang, preached and were generally hypocritical and intolerant. And whilst these were bad enough on a one-to-one basis, gathered together they were truly insufferable.

Perhaps not surprisingly, many Christians are inclined to give up on church: either personally – they no longer meet together because it is frankly depressing and unhelpful – or evangelistically – they don’t mind having a conversation about Jesus but will do anything in their power to avoid mentioning church, let alone inviting anyone to one.  To stick up for church is to defend the indefensible. To see it as a positive evangelistic tool is little short of loopy.

And yet, perhaps the reality is different. Over 2005-06, LICC partnered with an ecumenical group in Scotland to interview a number of people who had become Christians at some point in the previous two years.  The project, Journeys and Stories, was something of an antidote to Beyond Belief? It located and listened to 41 adults who had made a recent public profession of faith, and tried to understand why. Why – when God is supposedly dead, religion a cause of global conflict, and the Church inflexible, irrelevant and illiberal – would anyone become a Christian?

Respondents were of both sexes, came from all major denominations and none, were aged between 18 and 80, had a variety of un/chuched backgrounds, and lived in 16 different locations across Scotland. We expected diversity.

But we did not expect as much diversity as we got. The sheer variety of crises, co-incidences, encounters, experiences, sermons, signposts, and obstacles voiced by respondents was bewildering. Had you not known people were talking about the same thing, it would have been hard to guess.

There were, however, common themes that emerged from the tangle of lives and experiences. People had ‘starting points’, situations, beliefs or lifestyles from which they left (often unknowingly) to begin their journey. They had reasons for ‘departure’, motives for wanting to change themselves or aspects of their lives or simply to explore something different; motives that were sometimes conscious and chosen but equally often hidden or obscure.

There were ‘signposts’ on the way, people, sermons, experiences, events, and feelings that shaped their journey and directed it towards a destination that had not been part of the original reason for departure; signposts, in other words, that turned journeys into pilgrimages.

There was a map, the Bible, which they were handed at some, usually late point in their journey, that sometimes helped and sometimes hindered their understanding of whence they had come and whither they were travelling. There were ‘obstacles’ along the way, things that frustrated and impeded their journeys, which had much in common with the signposts. And there was an arrival, a sense that life was now somehow different – usually better, occasionally more problematic – but also a sense that this arrival was in fact simply another point of departure.

No two stories were the same and definitive conclusions were impossible. Journeys tended to be gradual – but for some people they were sudden and decisive. One man stumbled across God TV somewhere in the depths of the Sky running order and was a convinced believer six weeks later. Slow and measured journeys lent a weight and seriousness to people’s conversion – but one of the most honest and mature ethical responses of anyone interviewed came from God TV man. Personal interaction played a key role in the majority of stories – but one or two respondents were more affected by books or films. No matter how you chose to summarise people’s journeys, someone would prove you wrong.

Whereas definitive conclusions were problematic, generalisations were, at least, possible. Three distinctive factors stand out. First, there was the importance of people. It is people who bring others to Christ – hold the front page! But not special or particular people. The research showed that you didn’t have to be a minister, an elder or a theology graduate to play this role. Everyone – ‘our son … my sister … my gran … my ex-girlfriend … this family I teach … my wife’s colleague’ – did their part. There were no extras.

Second was the importance of God. This is obvious, you would think, but as a researcher you don’t really want God to turn up. Quite apart from anything else, God does not come with a barcode. If people’s everyday experiences were open to widely differing interpretations, their experience of God was even more so. It is, ultimately, simply impossible to say whether something was ‘of God’ or not. You have to rely on how people understand and articulate their own experiences, and you have no way of verifying or falsifying them. Any attempt to rationalise or validate what people said leads you down the path of attempting to explain whether, how and why God works in creation, a path from which few return.

That noted, however, there was a distinct sense of God in people’s journeys, partly in the encounters, coincidences and healings of which they spoke, but more in the fact that the whole of each person’s story was somehow greater than the sum of its parts. Taken apart, journeys consisted ‘simply’ of decisions, encounters, healings, resolutions, and the like. Put together, there was a pattern that hinted at some sense of order behind the chaos.

But it was the third point, the importance of the church, which really stood out.  It was not something we expected, for all the obvious reasons. Yet, time and again, respondents surprised both themselves and their interviewers. They spoke in overwhelmingly positive terms about the impact that the church, meaning a body of Christians gathered together almost irrespective of place and circumstance, had had on them.

There was ‘something completely different’ about it, a ‘feeling of togetherness and unconditional acceptance’, ‘the only unconditional relationship I’ve had in my life’.  ‘They were… the church family in the proper sense,’ one young man said. ‘When they were worshipping… these people were expressing happiness and joy… I had never seen,’ said another.

This wasn’t the misty-eyed naivety of the new convert. Interviewees were alert to ‘the shenanigans that… go on in all churches – the in-fighting, the politics.’ They were not afraid of naming hypocrisy when they saw it.

But this strengthened rather than weakened their main point. What they experienced was somehow different, and certainly different from the ultra-low expectations that many would have started with.

Should this surprise us?   Christians, more than most people, know how ghastly churches can be: difficult, disappointing, duplicitous. It is a testimony to Christianity, at least since the Reformation, that is has not been scared of criticising its own incarnation. Yet, self-criticism should not be confused with self-flagellation. We buy into others’ narratives at our own cost. The Church has problems. Churches have problems. But it is not the problem.

Indeed, it may be the solution. We do loneliness very well in modern Britain. We are so wedded to the ideas of individuality, of independence, of personal sovereignty, that we have failed to notice that our humanity, our well-being, is wedded to other people. And the more we prize autonomy and self-actualisation, the more we erode the ties that not only bind but enable us to flourish as human beings.

We do community too, of course, but it is increasingly founded on shared interests or experiences, from football to motherhood. There is nothing wrong with this – indeed, we could hardly be human without it. But the testimony of a group of disparate individuals, of all ages and backgrounds, brought and bound together by nothing more than a common object of love – albeit partially understood, grudgingly received, and imperfectly given – is more powerful than we realise. Where else today might you find such a disparate, ordinary group giving time, money, thought, and energy on a week-by-week basis to complete strangers? Where else would you find such a group willing to admit its inadequacies, failings and griefs? Where else would you find it attempting to nurture gratitude for those mundane, everyday things that we so easily take for granted? All too often we fail to realise that the Church’s repeated failure to succeed in its ambitions is less striking than its willingness to try and go on trying for them.

St Paul didn’t have that mental block. Indeed, the fact that he spent rather more time showing and telling the earliest Christian communities how to live together as kingdom people, rather than encouraging them to tell their neighbours about Jesus is something of an embarrassment to us today. ‘Live in harmony with one another (Rom 12.16)… Carry each other’s burdens (Gal 6.2)… Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace (Eph 4.3)… Bear with each other and forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another (Col 3.13)…’ Almost nothing he wrote is free of this burden.

Such exhortations should not blind us to those churches’ problems. The Corinthian correspondence is crammed full of reminders that ‘we, who are many, are one body’ (1 Cor 10.17), largely because things had gone so wrong. The feuding and fighting that Paul encountered would do us proud today.

And yet, in spite of these failings, of the deceit, of ‘the shenanigans… the in-fighting, the politics,’ somehow, it worked. When Paul writes of the unbeliever stumbling into an early church service only to ‘fall down and worship God, exclaiming, "God is really among you"’ (1 Cor 14.24-25), he sounds hopelessly optimistic today. Even if we acknowledge the continuing possibility of this, it is because, as Paul says, the unbeliever will hear ‘everybody… prophesying… will be convinced by all that he is a sinner and will [see] the secrets of his heart… laid bare.’ In other words, the unbeliever’s recognition will basically be due to penetrating prophecy alone. We are, however, liable to forget that Paul’s discussion of the prophetic word follows on from his paean to love in chapter 13, to which it is firmly anchored: ‘Follow the way of love and eagerly desire spiritual gifts, especially the gift of prophecy.’ (1 Cor 14.1)

Perhaps we are not so different from the first century. Rocked by sexual scandals, torn apart by feuds, disagreeing over the doctrines by which we are supposed to live, failing to meet the standards we proclaim, and yet, somehow, by the grace of God, creating fragile, loving communities that, do indeed, against all expectation, work; places that risk the openness, the space needed for broken people to meet a healing saviour.

One of the strongest messages to emerge from Journeys and Stories was that attempting to live as a community of believers united only by a common object of love, and attempting to cultivate a culture that is hospitable, joyful, encouraging, and loving – even if we fail in every one of those of attempts – is the most powerful testimony possible. It constitutes a significant contribution to people’s journeys to God, a compelling invitation to a banquet, perhaps even a sign that the kingdom of God is here.

This article first appreared in Third Way.

Beyond Belief? and Journeys and Stories are both available from LICC’s website, priced £5. For more details visit: www.licc.org.uk