I love my church, and I think you should love yours too. Love the people. Turn up. Serve. Give. Pray. Invest in relationships. Stick around when things aren’t perfect. Don’t treat church like YouTube Shorts, endlessly scrolling through congregations looking for better worship, shorter sermons and coffee that doesn’t taste like it was filtered through an old sock.

Being committed to a local church is a good thing. But there’s a subtle difference between “I love my church” and “my church is better than your church.” Sometimes we cross that line without noticing.

We compare preaching, worship, theology, kids’ work and outreach. We become strangely interested in how many people go to the church down the road. We reassure ourselves that while they might be growing, our theology is definitely better. Before long, the church down the road starts feeling suspiciously like the competition.

And that’s a problem.

Christians say some weird stuff. I know because I’m one of them.

I’ve been around church long enough that I can comfortably talk about being “in a season”, “feeling led”, needing some “quiet time”, having something “put on my heart”, and asking God for a “hedge of protection” without giving any of it a second thought.

But imagine walking into church for the first time. You don’t know where to sit. You don’t know when to stand up. Someone has already hugged you despite you quite clearly going for a handshake. Then the person next to you starts praying for God to surround you with a hedge.

A what? Are we praying or landscaping?

Church should be one of the safest places in the world.

It should be where wounded people find healing, lonely people find family and those carrying heavy burdens find people willing to help, and at its best, it totally is. Sadly, sometimes the place that should help us heal becomes the place where we are hurt.

Church hurt cuts deeply because the people who wound us are often the same people we trusted to protect us. We prayed together, worshipped together and may have shared parts of our lives that almost nobody else knew about.

If someone is rude to you in Tesco, you can avoid that checkout for a while. When someone hurts you while claiming to represent Jesus, it can leave you wondering whether Jesus is safe.

There is a dangerous moment in many Christian conversations. Someone tells us something painful. Their marriage is falling apart. Old trauma has resurfaced. Their mental health is unravelling. They are frightened by something happening in their body.

We care. We want to help. Then, somewhere between, “I’m so sorry,” and, “Let me pray for you,” we accidentally appoint ourselves marriage counsellor, trauma specialist, medical consultant and, occasionally, minor prophet.

Christians are capable of extraordinary compassion and extraordinary confidence after one podcast and half a book. Give us a Bible, a mug of tea and somebody in distress, and we feel an irresistible need to produce an answer.

It comes from a good place. But you can assemble an IKEA wardrobe with a loving heart and still put the doors on backwards. Sincere advice can also cause damage when it travels beyond our ability

A few weeks ago, my mate Andy, an elder in one of our church plants in North Wales, was telling me about a book he read about a fella called John Harper.

I came home, and as I read more I was blown away. I mean…wow…what a guy!

Harper was a 39-year-old Scottish Baptist pastor, a widower and father to six-year-old Annie Jessie, known as Nana. In April 1912, he boarded the Titanic with Nana and Jessie Leitch, who helped care for her. They were travelling to Chicago, where he had been invited to preach.

On the night of 14 April, the Titanic struck an iceberg. What he did next is a remarkable example of devotion to Christ.

Christians have never agreed about everything.

Give two believers a Bible, a pot of coffee and enough time, and eventually they will disagree about spiritual gifts, women preaching, what heaven is like, whether Christians should drink alcohol, and whether the latest controversial politician is the Antichrist or merely an unpleasant prat.

Some disagreements matter enormously. Others matter, but not enormously. Some barely matter at all, although you would never know it from the number of angry Facebook comments they generate.

The challenge is knowing the difference.

I love church planting. I love the vision. I love the faith. I love the stories of lives transformed, communities reached, and new gospel communities established in places that desperately need them. Church planting matters because people matter. Every church plant represents the hope that more people might hear the gospel, more disciples might be made, and more worship might rise to God from places where it previously did not.

But there is a side of church planting that rarely gets talked about.

Last week I joined a team going to Albania. Our mission trip to Albania began, as all great spiritual adventures do, with a delay at Manchester Airport. It was only an hour, which by Ryanair standards probably counts as a minor miracle.

We’d left the UK during a scorching heatwave, so travelling somewhere even hotter felt slightly surreal. Most of us met for the first time at the airport and, to my enormous relief, everybody seemed surprisingly pleasant. This was important because we were about to spend a week living together in temperatures of around 37 degrees.

Our destination was Berat, a beautiful Albanian town surrounded by mountains. Mountains are lovely to look at, but they also appear to prevent anything resembling a breeze from reaching the town. Thirty seven degrees without wind feels closer to 45, which meant we would spend much of the week smelling like the armpit of a sweaty giant.

Last weekend I visited the Areopagus in Athens.

If the name doesn’t immediately ring a bell, it’s the place most people know as Mars Hill, where the Apostle Paul stood in Acts 17 and addressed the philosophers, intellectuals and religious thinkers of ancient Greece.

If I’m honest, I had imagined something a little more dramatic. Perhaps a grand platform, an impressive monument, or at the very least a rock that didn’t feel like it was actively trying to throw me down a hill. Instead, what I found was a surprisingly slippery lump of stone. After a couple of thousand years of tourists, pilgrims and curious Christians retracing Paul’s steps, the surface has been polished smoother than my freshly shaved head. One wrong step and I could easily have found myself recreating the Fall in a very literal sense.

I know what you’re thinking… it’s not Monday. Why am I getting a Grace & Grit article today?

Well, I’m sat in an Airbnb in Darlington, drinking a coffee and waiting for a couple of eggs to boil before heading back for day two of a leaders’ conference, and I wanted to share something I’ve been reflecting on.

Yesterday I listened to a teaching session from Chris Frost that I haven’t quite been able to shake.

Now, if you gather a few hundred church leaders in one place, you expect to hear about mission, church planting, discipleship, leadership and reaching people with the gospel. And rightly so. Those things matter. What I wasn’t expecting was to spend the evening thinking about a garden trowel taped to a stick.

My church is part of a family of churches called ChristCentral, which sits within the wider Newfrontiers family. One of the distinctives of ChristCentral churches is that we’re called to be “friends together.”

Now, I’ll be honest, that can sound a bit sickly sweet if we’re not careful. Like something embroidered onto a cushion in a Christian bookshop next to a mug that says, “Too blessed to be stressed,” almost exclusively owned by someone who is visibly stressed.

But “friends together” isn’t just a nice slogan. It’s not a networking strategy with a Bible verse stapled to it. It’s not simply church leaders saying, “We can achieve more if we pool our resources, share a PA system, and occasionally borrow each other’s folding chairs.”

If you’ve spent any amount of time in Christian circles over the last couple of years, you will definitely have heard someone talking about the “quiet revival.”

Young people turning up to church. Teenagers asking spiritual questions. University students becoming curious about Jesus again. Youth ministries growing. Stories of unexpected conversions popping up all over the place.

And something definitely is happening. I’ve seen it myself.