It's an unsettling feeling.

You go online and discover that someone has written a negative review — perhaps even a cruel and unusually harsh review — of your church on Yelp, a popular site where customers can rate businesses.

It's unsettling, yes, but it's easy to see the basic reasoning behind it: I'm writing a review of this church so that others can make an informed decision before attending a service, just as they would do when they're trying to find a good restaurant.

But there's a reason why I have chosen the word "unsettling" to describe how it feels to come across one of these reviews. The church is not a restaurant. The bride of Christ is not a supplier of goods and services for consumers. It is not a hotel that you can rate on Trip Advisor.

It is a relationship in progress.

The moment you step into a Christian community you're seeing something extremely important play out in real time. You're witnessing a relationship in progress between the Bridegroom (Jesus Christ) and His beloved Bride (the Church).

Within that larger relationship, something else is happening that makes the Father's heart glad: millions of relationships between Christians are in motion on the earth. These innumerable little interactions, some wonderful and some challenging, weave the body of Christ together like sinews and tendons.

However, "Yelp Christianity" — the kind of self-focused Christianity that treats churches like consumer goods — has very little awareness of this crucial, in-progress corporate relationship between God and His people. Yelp Christians walk into churches and say in their hearts, "How will you serve me and meet my needs?" instead of asking, "How can I serve you and meet your needs as a church?"

At its worst, Yelp Christianity reduces the most complex and mysterious relationship in history — the relationship between the King of kings and His beloved queen-in-the-making — into a takeout meal at a restaurant. This trend hurts those who dedicate years to a small, struggling ministry. Even small congregations represent complex knots of human histories, life stories, epic triumphs, bitter defeats and ongoing hardships.

Misunderstanding the Heart of the Gospel
Recently, a mother in our church was diagnosed with cancer. When the crisis hit, the church linked arms with the woman and her family. We rallied around the mother in prayer, and we did what we could to carry the family through the nightmare.

It was astonishing to witness the body of Christ mobilize around that little family. I remember the many tears during the Monday night prayer meetings, and I remember the burst of clapping and cheering when the woman announced her cancer was in remission.

Like many trials we've pushed through as a Body, it was a long road. But through every hard mile, the church grew closer to Christ and closer to each other.

So when a first-time visitor walks briskly out of church without talking to anyone, and when I see their negative Yelp review referring to lack of good programs and a boring worship service, I'm astonished and speechless.

The Holy Spirit grieves when we treat our brothers and sisters in Christ like consumer goods on a shelf. Instead, God calls us to radical commitment and a relentless loyalty to the bride of Christ.

Years of complex human stories with hard-fought victories and painful losses are overlooked, unknown, devalued and dismissed with a casual click of the mouse.

Is that really the heart of the Gospel?

Churches can and should be assessed. We should be open to examination and look for ways to improve. Honest rebukes can lead to real growth and breakthrough, and in some cases, even negative Yelp reviews can be a tremendous help to a church.

But when the snap-judgment tendencies of our culture are combined with the immediacy of online reviews, it can be devastating and demoralizing for churches, ministry leaders and those in the fellowship.

Instead of seeing churches as manifestations of God's ongoing relationship with His people — and looking for ways that we can contribute to that relationship in a positive way — Yelp Christianity views churches as products to consume and then discard the moment they lose their flavor.

A Broader Cultural Problem: Oversimplifying the Human Soul
The problem of Yelp Christianity stems from our culture's oversimplification of the human soul and this is but one example of it. In fact, a new app called Peeple has engineered this bad habit into an art form. The Peeple app allows you to rate anyone you know using a five-star system in the same way we rate a business on Yelp.

Psychologist Pamela Rutledge, director of the Media Psychology Research Center in Newport Beach, California, noted in a recent interview with Business Insider that the Peeple app does a great disservice to the way we understand others:

"'Instead of a nuanced face-to-face interaction, people will be able to give blanket judgments on Peeple,' [Rutledge] said. 'As a society, we're already struggling to figure out how to navigate human relationships in an online world, and reducing someone to a single number or a basic review is 'a gross simplification of human experience,' added Rutledge."

A Restoration of Covenantal (Not Consumer) Relationships
My prayer is this: May God restore to us a deep revelation of what covenantal relationship means. The idea of committing long-term to anything, whether it's a marriage, job or church, has become a foreign concept to Western culture. Everything is revocable. We always leave ourselves an "out" — a stipulation that if something falls below our standards, we're entitled to leave.

But that's not what we see in the Gospel or in the extraordinary lives of the apostles and the Early Church fathers. The Holy Spirit grieves when we treat our brothers and sisters in Christ like consumer goods on a shelf. Instead, God calls us to radical commitment and a relentless loyalty to the bride of Christ even when she is full of blemishes and flaws that make us cringe.

And if Christ told us to forgive those who wrong us 70 times 7 (Matthew 18:22), couldn't we at least think twice before publishing a review that trashes another Christian's ministry — a ministry representing years of faithful service to God — just because something about their Sunday service annoyed us?

This article originally appeared on Vital and has been adapted with permission.