Dear North American Church,
After a Sunday morning in Africa, you don’t look the same to me. You look hungry. Hungrier than anything I’ve seen in Africa.
Because after I watched that Ugandan woman? That one woman with no shoes and no husband and 7 kids, walk up to the front of the church and put this bag of beans into the basket as her love offering to God – my heart ached this raw conviction and I could feel it with you, North American Church, what you really wanted:
You’re hungry to love like this. You are hungry for the uncomfortable.
You are hungry to sacrifice your Starbucks coffees, your NetFlix subscription, your dinners out for something More. You’re hungry for more than vanilla services, and sweetened programs, and watered down lives.
You’re famished for More, for hard and holy things, for some real meat for your starved soul, some real dirt under your fingernails, some real sacrifice in your veins – some real Jesus in your blood and in your hands and in your feet.
I’m sitting under a tree in Africa with the richest in the world and it’s not Bill Gates and it’s not Warren Buffet and it’s not Mark Zuckerberg and it’s not the family with 2 cars, a flat screen television and one week at Disney. It’s a bunch of kids in Africa in ripped shirts and torn shoes, who have no knives or forks and sleep on floors.
The Pastor invites us to sing. I’m not sure how to find my feet. I am not sure how to let go. I am not sure how to live. The song begins a cappella, hearts the only instrument we all have:
Soon and very soon
We are going to see the King
Soon and very soon
We are going to see the King …
I sing the words looking out at a congregation of worn out clothes hanging over tired backs and hungry bellies and willing hands. I sing the words looking into the whites of eyes in weathered ebony faces. And then I am only mouthing the words. Like there’s no voice left in me.
Like there’s no way I can sing that soon and very soon we’re all going to see our Father – when I’m living like this – and my brothers and sisters are living like that. When too many North Americans diet for a hobby, and too many Africans die for a meal. When our churches have building budgets and our sisters have dying children.
If God is real, if the King of Kings and Lord of Lords is really on the throne, if we are all going to see our Jesus King face to face, soon and very soon – then there’s a whole lot of us who are wild to change things soon. Now.
I am standing in Africa and there’s light in the trees and there is clarity and there are those who are saved but only by the skin of their teeth – because they cared most about the comfort of their own skin and only minimally about anyone else’s. They will have a hardly abundant entrance awaiting them in heaven.
But that is not us. There are those who would rather turn away instead of turn around. There are those who would rather turn a blind eye to the needy than turn to the needy and be like Christ. There are those who would love playing at being Christian, than to actually be one and love giving.
But that is not us.
North American Church, it is time: We are all done with no-risk, no-sacrifice, no-point lives.
It is time: We are all done with the drug of comfortable and dare to live the dream of uncomfortable.
It is time: We’re all hungry for uncomfortable because we’re hungry for God – and He is outside of our comfort zones.
This. Is. What. Faith. Is.
excerpt from A Letter to the North American Church, by Ann Voskamp