{This post will take a little different form and won’t point to the subject of the series till I wrap up at the end of the post.}
I had a great conversation with the One Church guys the other morning about the idea of “getting out of our comfort zones”. I got really agitated because I agreed that the idea of asking people in church to “get out of their comfort zones” and do something for Christ is silly. If your deal in life is music, why not just be who you are and do music. Don’t make that person help in children’s ministry when that is not God’s plan for them. This is something that has bugged me for years in churches.
However…
I got to thinking more about this and decided there are times in church when we should ask people to get out of their comfort zones. And many times we do. These things have nothing to do with giftedness either. These are things that all Christians should be expected to do and live out. And for many, it will take a step out of what makes them feel comfy. Here are a couple of examples that came to mind…
The church is no more “post-racial” than the whole of our country is. But shouldn’t we be taking the lead on this? It’s tough because everyone chooses to stay comfortable and mostly associate with people, and other Christians, just like them. Having one friend of another race and pointing back to that is not stepping out of your comfort zone. Choosing to place yourself in a minority situation for the purpose of learning about and getting to know “the other” is. God can and does use different methods and cultures to speak to us, but I can’t believe he is happy with a mostly segregated Church who won’t even visit with each other. My wife is African American and even I am the chief of sinners here…
The poor. We talk about the poor. We pray for the poor. We even give money to the poor. But it is so awkward to hang out and get to know them that we just choose not too. We avoid the parts of town associated with them. Heck, some of us don’t even know where those parts of town are! Again, is God happy with a Church who can not even hang out with the people that Jesus associated himself with and told us that they were where we’d find him? Caedmon’s Call has a song lyric that goes like this “the least of these look like criminals to me, so I leave Christ on the street.” We have to remove ourselves from our comfy suburban homes sometimes to find Christ.
Finally, being missional and incarnational generally takes us stepping out of our comfort zones. Here in the US we are not built to reach out. We live in suburbs with garages and no front porch so that we can get away from it all. You can literally get home and be out of site before your neighbor sees you. You never have to speak to them. We basically live in social bunkers. Being incarnational is really hard to do within a comfort zone because you can never truly learn what it is to be like ______. You can’t get onto the same level as those you reach out to unless you strip away all those things that make you socially safe. Comfort and safety are not things that lend themselves well to a missional life.
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