Well I never know where my blog will come from and today it comes from Ad Week’s coverage of the new Michael Phelps commercial.

Remember the Olympic medal tainting episode following the Beijing games last year, when Phelps once again made headlines for smoking marijuana? The pot smoking is just a little blip in Phelps’ Wikipedia entry—in fact, a drunk driving incident precedes it, with a full paragraph about the then-19-year-old’s errant behavior that led him to be forced to speak to high school students about drinking and driving. I never knew that. Like most fair-weather fans, I never knew Phelps until the eight gold medals at Beijing.

On the marijuana issue, Phelps says he made a mistake, a lapse in judgment.

While sponsors such as Kellogg did not renew Phelps’ contract, Speedo and Omega kept the Olympian. And this week Subway debuted a new television commercial featuring Phelps and the sandwich chain’s spokesperson, Jared.

According to Ad Week, the new spot deals smartly with the Olympian’s gaffe: “While it's been months since talk of Phelps' marijuana use ignited the tabloids, the smoke from that public relations flame-out still smolders. Instead of pretending the fiasco never happened, Subway smartly (and subtly) turns it into a nonjudgmental message of individuality -- and it works.”

I see this as an interesting metaphor for how churches deal with sin. In post-post-modern America, "sin" isn’t exactly the right word anymore. Instead, people make mistakes or personal choices. Suppose your congregation members included Jared and Phelps. One, an admittedly  recovering glutton; one, a pot smoker. How would your fellowship deal with these people and their problems? Would you go Kellogg and once mistakes come to light kick people out, saying they no longer fit? Or would you go Subway and call mistakes “personal choices?”

Sometimes churches inadvertently highlight sin by calling up people to give testimonies about their sinful lives and how God delivered them. Sometimes churches offer grace too easily, with no discussion of repentance. Sometimes churches have a zero-tolerance policy that eliminates sin altogether by forcing it underground and behind the masks people start wearing to church. I’ve attended all three types of churches.

I thought about all this while watching the new Subway ad. I also thought about how difficult it would be if, after I made a mistake (sinned), television news cameras came and accosted me in parking lots and asked me questions like, “What were you thinking?”

I thought about how it would be if I was featured on the cover of a magazine, making my mistake.

I thought about how it would be if my mistake kept surfacing in every news piece written after it, as an aside paragraph in a story otherwise all about swimming.

Famous. Infamous. Athlete. Substance abuser. Role model. Dope.

I like what Mark Driscoll says about good guys and bad guys. Despite our cultural tendency to categorize people as one or the other, there are no good guys. We’re all bad guys. The good guy is Jesus. That’s a paraphrase from a talk I heard on CD recently. I think that’s a good reminder to churches about mistakenly categorizing people as sinners and Christians. We’re all sinners. Admitting our mistakes should be part of each day and part of every church. Forgiving each other and remembering God’s saving grace in Christ should be a very real part of church life.