On the Sinful Church

I've been reading The Jesus I Never Knew by Yancey at night before I fall asleep. I thought this section was helpful for how to think about the visible church that is so sinful.

"I could fill several pages with such colorful quotations [about the church's failings], all of which underscore the risk involved in entrusting God's own reputation to the likes of us. Unlike Jesus, we do not perfectly express the Word. We speak in garbled syntax, stuttering, mixing languages together, putting accent marks in wrong places. When the world looks for Christ it sees, like the cave-dwellers in Plato's allegory, only shadows created by the light, not the light itself.

"Why don't we look more like the church Jesus described? Why does the body of Christ so faintly resemble him? If Jesus could foresee such disasters as the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Christian slave trade, apartheid, why did he ascend in the first place?

"I cannot provide a confident answer to such questions, for I am part of the problem. Examined closely, my query takes on a distressingly personal cast: Why do I so poorly resemble him?" (234).