People in Gulf Breeze have been finding big green postcards in their mailboxes with the words “we’re sorry” printed in white. The back of the postcards cards say “Let’s be honest…Christians have really messed up at times. We’re sorry we’ve been judgmental, we’ve been unloving, we’ve been hypocritical, we’ve let you down. We’ve acted nothing like Jesus.”
The cards come from the Storypoint church which is located in Gulf Breeze Proper. Jeff Spooneybarger is the lead Pastor at the Church. He says the idea for the campaign came from a parishioner. "He came to me after a service one day and said 'Jeff, I have an idea. It's a little bit crazy.' He was trying to prepare me for what he was going to tell me. But, honestly the best ideas come from just people who God says 'Hey I wont you to do this, I want you to lead in this'. So when he told me his idea I thought 'you know, let's think about this and let's get other people in the church to give us opinions' because we want to be careful about it, but essentially we have recognized that churches have a bad reputation in some different ways. And sometimes it's justified, sometimes it's not. And our purpose was to say 'you know, we're sorry if you've been offended by Christians and have maybe thought that God was behind that'. Because God doesn't do dumb things. People do dumb things. And so by saying we're sorry we're acknowledging that we haven't always acted the way that Jesus expected us to act."
Pastor Spooneybarger also said:
- There was no single incident that inspired this parishioners' idea. Just observations of people's additives about Christians from his conversations about Jesus and the church with friends.
- They are not trying to be overly harsh towards Christians, just pointing out the need "to own it" when they do not act as Jesus would have.
- There has not been any negative reaction from the public about the cards, although he certainly doesn't rule that out. Spooneybarger says it would be naive to think that as Christians have nothing to apologize for.
Jeff Spooneybarger is the lead Pastor of the Storypoint Church and the First Baptist Church in Gulf Breeze. You can see his recorded message at weresorrygb.com.
