“Comfort is expensive. It costs the Church her MISSION and the world its only HOPE.” Peter Jerry

We tend to think of comfort as a quiet, harmless backdrop to our lives that simply exists, costing nothing, demanding nothing, and asking nothing of us in return but I want also to challenge that assumption directly, because I believe that it is one of the most dangerous illusions the modern Church lives with.

COMFORT IS NEVER FREE!

Someone, somewhere, is paying for it and in the case of the Church, it is the unreached world that has been paying the bill for generations.

The global Church is wealthier today than at any point in Christian history and this is not a controversial claim but simply a demographic and economic fact.

Hundreds of millions of believers live with resources, technology, and disposable income that previous generations of Christians could not have imagined.

We have more money flowing through Christian hands today than the early, medieval, Reformation-era, or even the missionary-sending Church of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries ever possessed. We have transportation that can move a person across the globe in less than a day. We have communication technology that allows instant connection with workers on the most remote fields on earth. We have theological education, missiological research, and linguistic tools that previous generations of missionaries would have considered miraculous.

By every available metric, we are the most equipped generation of Christians in the history of the Church to finish the task of reaching the nations, yet it’s unfortunate that the pace at which unreached peoples are actually being reached has not accelerated to match our true capacity.

There are entire people groups who remain without a single Church, a single translated Scripture, a single sustained Gospel witness, not because the resources to reach them do not exist, but because those resources have been directed elsewhere else like our comfort, institutions and towards our programs, facilities, and experiences.

I am not saying this to condemn the Church for having resources, or for using resources to build healthy local ministries but I am saying this because the proportion is the problem.

When a congregation’s budget reflects something like ninety-something percent directed inward and a small remaining fraction directed towards reaching the unreached, that proportion is not a neutral budgeting decision, but a theological statement, whether we intend it as one or not, telling us what the Church actually believes matters most.

I want to be direct about something I have observed both in Africa and through years of engaging with Churches and partners in wealthier contexts:

COMFORT HAS A WAY OF QUIETLY RECALIBRATING OUR SENSE OF WHAT COUNTS AS NEED.

A congregation that is already accustomed to a certain level of facility, programming, and amenity will by default, begin to experience any reduction in that level as a genuine hardship, even when that same congregation walks past communities and nations where people have never once heard the Gospel preached.

We have become remarkably sensitive to the discomfort of slightly outdated sound equipment but terribly numb to the eternal discomfort of millions of people who will die having never heard the name of Jesus. That recalibration did not happen overnight, and it did not happen by accident. It happened because comfort, when it is left unexamined, always expands to fill whatever space it is given, and justifies itself with reasonable-sounding explanations.

The cost of this is measured in villages that remain unreached an additional generation because the funding that could have sent and sustained a worker was instead diverted into another renovation, upgrade, and another improvement to an already well-resourced ministry context. It is measured in missionaries who return home, presenting their need with hope and humility, and leaving with a fraction of what their work requires, while the congregation they presented to continues investing many multiples of that amount into its own facilities the very same year. The cost is measured, ultimately, in eternal destinies who could have heard, could have been reached, could have become the kind of multiplying movement described in the previous post in this series, had the resources required to reach them not been diverted toward keeping the already-reached comfortable.

I do not say any of this from a place of self-righteousness, as though I am exempt from the temptations of comfort myself.

Every believer, with the rural Nigeria included, wrestles with the pull towards comfort, security, and towards the things that feel reasonable and modest in the moment but accumulate into something that competes directly with the mission we claim to be devoted to. This is not a Western problem or a wealthy-Church problem exclusively. It is a human problem, and it shows up wherever resources exist alongside the option to either hoard them in comfort or release them towards the harvest.

So I want to ask you something today that I think the Church needs to sit with honestly, without rushing to a comfortable answer:

WHAT WOULD IT LOOK LIKE FOR YOU, SPECIFICALLY, TO LIVE JUST SLIGHTLY LESS COMFORTABLY SO THAT THE UNREACHED COULD LIVE ETERNALLY?

I honestly think a real, felt reduction in some areas of personal comfort, redirected with intention towards the frontier, a vacation scaled back so that the difference funds a worker’s monthly support, a subscription cancelled so that the savings go towards Bible translation in a language that has never had one.

These are not dramatic gestures and they will not make headlines. But multiplied across thousands of believers willing to make the same kind of modest, intentional sacrifice, they represent exactly the kind of resource redirection that could fund the finishing of the Great Commission within our lifetime.

Comfort is expensive and we rarely calculate its true cost because the bill does not arrive at our door, it arrives at the door of a village that never received a missionary, a language that never received a translated Scripture, a generation that grew old and died without ever hearing what we already knew and simply kept to ourselves.

The world’s only hope should not be competing with our convenience. It is time we stopped letting it.

Grace to you.