When the church loses love, something deeper has gone wrong
I want to ask you a question that has been sitting heavily on my heart.
When someone who doesn’t go to church thinks about Christians, what do they think of first?
Do they think of love? Do they think of kindness, gentleness, and patience? Or do they think of something else, anger, political noise, a long list of everything we’re against?
I think we already know the answer. And it should grieve us.
Jesus Was Pretty Clear
He didn’t leave us guessing about what would mark His followers. He said it plainly:
“By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.” (John 13:35)
Not your doctrine. Not your stand against the culture. Not your theological precision. Love.
And the Holy Spirit, when He produces fruit in a surrendered life, leads with the same thing.
“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance: against such there is no law.” (Galatians 5:22-23).
Everything flows out of that first word: love.
If love is the first fruit, the mark of a disciple, the thing Jesus said would make the world take notice, why are so few Christians actually known for it?
You Cannot Give What You Have Never Received
Here is where we have to be honest about the root of the problem.
The church is not struggling with love because it lacks willpower or conviction. The church is struggling with love because so many of its people and preachers have never truly been wrecked by the love of God for them.
Think about that.
A man who has genuinely encountered the unconditional love of the Father, who has stood at the end of himself and felt those arms come around him anyway, that man cannot stay angry at a lost world. He cannot. The love that found him will pour out of him toward the very people he used to judge.
But a man who is still striving to earn God’s approval, still trying to prove his worth through zeal and correctness and hard preaching, that man has a problem that no amount of exhortation will fix. He is trying to give something he has not yet received.
The angry preacher is not the problem. He is the symptom. The disease is unfelt grace.
The Fruit Was Never the Goal
Here is something that might surprise you: fruit was never meant to be pursued.
The moment we start measuring ourselves, asking why the church is not showing more love, why Christians are not more loving, we have turned love into another performance standard. And that is the very system that is killing us.
A branch does not strain to produce fruit. A branch stays connected to the vine, and fruit comes. Naturally. Inevitably. Without striving.
The answer to a loveless church is not a stronger call to love harder. It is a deeper return to the Vine. It is abiding. It is what Jesus meant when He said:
“I am the vine, ye are the branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye can do nothing.” (John 15:5)
Not some things. Not smaller things. Nothing. Including love.
You do not manufacture the fruit of the Spirit. You receive the life of the Spirit. And the fruit follows, the way morning follows night.
God Did Not Send a Doctrine. He Sent a Person.
We sometimes talk about the love of God as though it is a theological category to be understood, a proposition to be affirmed. But God did not explain love from a distance. He became flesh.
He showed up. He touched the leper whom everyone else crossed the street to avoid. He stopped for the woman that no respectable man would acknowledge. He wept at a tomb even though He knew what He was about to do. He ate dinner with the people the religious crowd would not be seen with.
That is what love looks like when it has skin on it.
And when the life of that same Christ, that same love, begins to flow through a surrendered believer, it looks the same way. It shows up for people. It touches the untouchable. It sits with the broken. It weeps with those who weep. Not because it is trying to. Because it cannot help itself.
What I See on Social Media
I scroll through my feed, and I see preachers, men with decades of ministry, men who love the Word, and so much of what I read is anger.
Anger at the young people for walking away. Anger at soft preachers for sugarcoating the gospel. Anger at the culture for going in the wrong direction. The message underneath it all: do not go soft, preach repentance, preach hard truth, do not be a coward.
I want to say to every one of those men: I am not your enemy, and neither is love.
But I also want to say something harder. The anger you are carrying is a signal. Not of your courage but of your exhaustion. A man who has truly rested in the finished work of Christ, who knows beyond argument that he is loved not for what he has done but for what Christ has done, that man has a different spirit. Not soft. But different. There is grief in him, not contempt. Brokenheartedness, not frustration. He weeps over what is happening to this generation the way Jesus wept over Jerusalem, not with his fists clenched but with his heart broken open.
The difference between those two postures is the difference between religion and life.
Known by What We Are Against
Many churches and many preachers are defined entirely by what they oppose. The list is long, and the volume is high, and the watching world has noticed.
And here is what they have concluded: Christians do not seem to like us very much.
That is not a culture problem. That is a fruit problem.
Sin is real. Sin must be named. Sin destroys people. It wrecks marriages, steals childhoods, hollows out lives. You should hate sin, because sin hurts the people God loves. Holy hatred for sin is right and good.
But the person caught in sin is not the enemy. They are the mission. And they can tell, they can always tell, whether the person talking to them sees them as a problem to be fixed or a person to be loved.
Jesus looked at the rich young ruler who walked away, and the Scripture says He loved him. He let him walk. He did not chase him down or compromise the truth to keep him. But He loved him. That love was visible, even in the moment of refusal.
That is the standard. And it is a high one.
They Already Know
Here is something that took me years to understand. Most people who walk through life far from God do not need to be told they have made a mess of things. They already know. They feel it when they wake up in the morning. They carry it to bed at night. The shame is already there, the regret is already there, the quiet voice that says you have ruined this is already speaking loudly enough.
What they do not know is what to do about it. What they cannot find is a way back. And what they are desperately looking for, whether they would say so or not, is someone who will not add to the pile of condemnation they are already living under, but will instead point them toward a Father who was already running toward them before they ever turned around.
That is the message the church was entrusted with. Not more bad news. The world already has plenty of that. We were given the good news. And the good news is not “here is what you must do.” The good news is, “look at what has already been done.”
The prodigal did not need someone to tell him he smelled like pigs. He knew. He could smell himself. What he needed was a father who would run to him before he had a chance to clean himself up. And that is exactly what he got.
That is the gospel. And it is still the only message that can reach a person who has tried everything else and failed.
The Answer Is Not Less Truth. It Is More Encounter.
I am not calling for softer preaching. I am calling for preachers who have been broken open by the love of God, who preach repentance (a radical change of mind) with tears in their eyes because they know what it costs, who name sin clearly because they have seen what it steals, who call people home because they themselves know what it felt like to come home.
That kind of preaching needs no defense. It does not come across as angry or cruel. It comes across as true because it is coming from a man who has been there, who was found, who is still undone by the fact that he was loved when he had no right to be.
The prodigal’s father did not stand at the door with a list of conditions. He ran. He ran while the son was still a long way off. He threw a robe on him before the boy could finish his apology. He threw a party.
That is the Father we represent. That is the love we have received. And when we truly receive it, not just believe it in our heads but receive it in our bones, it changes everything about the way we move toward people.
The World Is Still Waiting
The watching world is not waiting for a stronger political voice from the church. They are not waiting for sharper condemnation or louder warnings.
They are waiting to see if anyone in the church actually loves them.
Not loves them in theory. Not loves them while holding them at arm’s length. Loves them the way the Father loved the prodigal, the way Jesus loved the woman at the well, the way the early church loved one another so visibly that the surrounding culture said, with astonishment: “Look how they love each other.”
You cannot argue someone into that kind of faith. You cannot frighten them into it or legislate them toward it.
But love can reach them. Because love is not finally a command to be obeyed. It is a life to be lived, the very life of Christ Himself, flowing through a person who has stopped striving and simply received what the Father has always been offering.
A branch does not work for its fruit. It rests in the vine. And the fruit comes.
“By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another.” Jesus (John 13:35)
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Austin Gardner has spent 50-plus years in ministry, including decades as a missionary in Peru. He writes at waustingardner.com.