Back home in Wisconsin I never really wondered if I would get a flat tire. I never worried whether or not the water heater would be broken. I took a lot of everyday things for granted. Today marks exactly one year of living in the Philippines. It has been a year of ministering in new ways to new people, complete with all the joys and challenges. It’s been one year of meeting new friends, one year of making a fool of myself trying to live in an unknown culture, one year of insane traffic and frustrating inefficiency. It’s also been a year of being (in some ways) distant from the church that I had loved and committed myself to. That distance has allowed me a perspective that I may never had known otherwise.
The phrase “absence makes the heart grow fonder” can be traced all the way back to authors in the 1600s. At this point I believe it’s true. I am currently 7,906 miles away from the church that showed me what Christianity really was and gave me a group of friends that were closer to me than I honestly would have thought possible and I am probably more thankful to the church than ever.
I can also say that this distance has revealed how easily I took the church I loved that totally changed my life for granted. And if you are taking the time to read this blog you probably do to. What once was a cause for great excitement, joy, devotion, and love can all to easily become a source of apathy and inspire only half-hearted commitment. Eternal gratitude fades to a complacent attitude of taking it all for granted.
When you take something for granted you don’t strive for it anymore. If I take my marriage for granted, I assume it will remain healthy no matter what I might do. If you take your job for granted you don’t put forth your best effort as an employee, because you believe your job is secure either way. When we start to take the church for granted, we will expect it to continue to function as God has instructed with no effort put in on our part. We assume the Church will evangelize the lost, but we don’t tell anyone about Jesus. We assume that lunch will be served after church, but we aren’t bothered to step up in our commitment to service. We assume that preaching will be Biblically accurate and move the hearer to obedience, but we can’t be bothered to obey ourselves.
What Believers church strives to be as a church is rare. In the last year I have visited my fair share of churches and I wouldn’t want to join any of them. Be thankful for the work that God is doing, the people He is doing it through, and the community He has called you into. Don’t allow familiarity to breed complacency, because from what I see, Believers church is something special. And if you assume that it will remain the “Biblical, Missional, Radical” community that God desires with no effort on your part, you just might be taking it for granted. Be thankful for what it is, and let that gratitude motivate you to fight for it.