Imagine this scenario. You are sitting in church with everything normal. The same as it is every single week that you go there. The air conditioning is set at a comfortable temperature. The worship band is playing your favorite songs and the words are up on the jumbo screen for everyone to follow along. Now the service ends so you go out into the lobby to get a drink from a drinking fountain or to buy your favorite coffee drink from the shop inside the church. Your next step is to get in your car drive home. The end.
Lets take the same scenario and make a few adjustments. What if I told you that you could no longer drive to church and instead it was going to be a mile or longer hike on dirt paths, through streams, and over hills in dress clothes to reach church. You can forget about taking a drink from a drinking fountain because there isn’t clean drinking water within miles of where you are going. Now lets take away the jumbo screen and worship band so that there is no electricity and all that remains is a single guitar that is going to break half way through worship. I hope everyone enjoyed the air conditioning in the first scenario because now it is gone and it has been replaced by the humidity of the tropics. Oh and by the way, there are no walls on the church so a plethora of different bugs will be flying around your head or crawling up your leg. If this is what church looked like for you every week, would you still go? Would the word of God be enough?
For many people who live in Panama, this is a very real scenario of what it looks like to go to church. It is what I experienced on my first Sunday in Panama and the most beautiful part of it all is that the only thing that matters is the word. Hearing the word, reading the word, learning from the word. That is all they need. For them, it wasn’t about where they get to go but it was about who they get to be in the presence of and I find that beautiful. So I ask again. If your church experience looked like scenario two. Would you still go? Would God and his word be enough? I hope your answer would be yes because he isn’t just enough, he is more then we could ever dream of and hope for.
