The kingdom of heaven, Jesus taught, is like a dragnet. It hauls in everything that it finds in its path. And so it is that we here, seated at this Table in history, must necessarily sit down with—to mix our metaphors—good fish, bad fish, broken beer bottles, reptiles, weeds, and old bicycle tires.
Jesus does promise us that the fish will all be sorted out at the end. The judgment at the end of history will be as exacting as promised, and in that final sorting there will be nothing that gets by Him. But this is the promised judgment at the end of history. We are living in the middle of history, and when we consider the state of the church today, we are up to our necks in refuse. This has made some of us think that God is not the right kind of fisherman.
But He did not say that the kingdom of God is like a fly fisherman, hand-tying his lures, and selecting just the right mountain stream, laboring faithfully to catch the rainbow trout of the elect, and only the rainbow trout of the elect, in order to bring them all home in the basket of the pure church.
No, the kingdom of God is a real mess on the beach. And we cannot fix everything by scootching together with other pure souls to have a “separated church” in one corner of the dragnet. Whatever makes us think that to cross the street (putting up another sign for another church) in any way alters the content of the dragnet? We cannot do in the midst of this process what Jesus said would only happen at the end of it.
One caveat. We do want to take all Scripture into account here. We do have the authority (in extreme cases) to excommunicate. That means we have the authority (and the competence) to throw the bicycle tire out of the net before the Second Coming. But we should be very wary of our tendency in wanting to rush these things—unchecked, we want to throw other good fish out because they are speckled differently than we are.