Disappointing Church

"Every time I move to a new community, I find a church close by and join it - committing myself to work and worship with that company of God's people.  I've never been anything other than disappointed: every one turns out to be biblical, through and through: murmurers, complainers, the faithless, the inconstant, those plagued with doubt and riddled with sin, boring moralizers, glamorous secularizers."

Thus Eugene Peterson, in Leap Over a Wall, p 101.  He adds in an endnote:

"I was pastor to one of these companies for thirty years, and thought I could organize something more along the lines of Eden, or better yet New Jerusalem.  But sinners kept breaking and entering and insisting on baptism, defeating all my utopian fantasies."

Well, I'm off to keep company with the other losers for a couple of hours.