Who is the church? Ugggh.

Let's take up some difficult teaching today. During one of the talks that are given at Kairos prison ministry meetings, someone asks, "Who is the church?" And the accepted reply is, "We are the church."

That doesn't mean what it once did. The church has become somewhat of a pariah, not because of Jesus' teachings but because of human actions.

Why is the church taking such a bashing today? Part of the reason is the way we handle the difficult matters. When the church can become news because of one priest's actions, well, the world or the "flesh" as the Apostle Paul would describe it, is winning. In a newspaper I read daily, today I read there is a God gap in the young disenfranchised and the older "church" goers. It's not hard to see why.

Take this story: As her elderly mother was dying, Barbara Johnson lay next to her on the hospital bed, reciting the "Hail Mary." Loetta Johnson, 85, had been a devout Catholic, raising her four children in the church and sending them to Catholic schools. At her mother's funeral mass at the St. John Neumann Catholic Church in Gaithersburg, Md., a grieving Barbara Johnson was the first in line to receive communion. What happened next stunned her. The priest refused Johnson, who is gay, the sacramental bread and wine. "He covered the bowl with the Eucharist with his hand and looked at me, and said I cannot give you communion because you live with a woman and that is a sin in the eyes of the church,"

The notion that sinners, those who haven't made peace with the ones they've sinned against, should not take communion is Biblical. Denying the Eucharist in public to someone who has sinned in private, not so much. A discussion about this should have happened before the communion service. To do so in this manner is nothing more than cruel, I would think. And it makes the news. And it makes the church look cruel in return. That the priest would tell the woman she is living in sin, having been in a relationship with another woman for 19 years, is not wrong, certainly. The Bible teaches this, no matter what she or others might say. But to do this in this manner at this time? A private meeting with her should have been mandatory. The fact to be remembered is Jesus ate with sinners. Jesus walked with sinners. Jesus taught sinners. So, too, should the church.

But then the church gets a chance to redeem itself in its teaching. The church gets to be what it was supposed to be.

The parents of Ohio school shooting victim Demetrius Hewlin said today they forgive suspected gunman T.J. Lane for shooting their son, noting sadly that Demetrius was often late for school but not late enough that day. "I don't know what [his] final moments were like, but I can't worry about it," Demetrius' mother Phyllis Ferguson told ABC News in an exclusive interview. "You have to accept things done and move on." When asked what she would say to the suspected shooter, Ferguson said, "I would tell him I forgive him because, a lot of times, they don't know what they're doing. That's all I'd say I taught Demetrius not to live in the past, to live in today and forgiveness is divine. You have to forgive everything. God's grace is new each and every day," she said

Ferguson gets it. The priest did not. I don't even know whether Ferguson goes to church, or what church, or what denomination. I know only that she gets it.

We live in a world where it is critical that the church quit being a moral judge even while it is failing to live a morally perfect life and become a loving, giving, sharing entity. If it does not, then the church is going to be a memory.

Who is the church? We are the church.