Setting the Bar

One of the mothers in my church recently purchased a book for, well, almost the entire church. The book is called Do Hard Things - written by two young men who have been attempting (quite successfully, it seems) to start what they call a "rebelution" - a rebellion against rebellion. These two young men started doing "hard things" for God when they were in their teen years and, through that process, were led to write a book questioning the assumptions society makes about teenagers.

I haven't finished the book yet, but right off the bat the Harris brothers make one significant point that applies not just to teenagers, but to all of us. They talk about how, 100 years ago, the word "teenager" didn't exist. You were either a child or adult. Children who reached the age of, say, 16, were expected to think, work, and act like adults. Something has happened in the last 100 years, though, which has created a whole new stage of life called the "teenage years" - where expectations for todays teenagers are often miserably low. The question posed by Do Hard Things, then, is when did it become okay to have such low expectations?

I read that and immediately my mind went to the church in general. When did it become okay for the expectations of Christians to be so low? Seriously. In many churches, what we expect of a "good" Christian is painfully simple: be at church every week, tithe 10%, and maybe volunteer for a ministry here and there. Those tend to be the HIGHEST expectations we have - we're satisfied if a family can make it to worship two out of every three Sundays and occasionally contributes to the offering. What happened? When did this become acceptable?

Surely, these weren't the same expectations Jesus had of his earliest followers, whom he challenged to go throughout the world and preach and minister. Surely these weren't the same expectations Paul had of the churches to which he wrote letters. He challenges them to do really hard things...just read through Paul's letters sometime and you'll see. The blueprint for the life of a follower of Christ is a constant call to do hard things for God. And yet somehow we've set the bar so low, have so little expectations for ourselves that we consider the simple act of tithing to be a "hard thing."

To be honest, it's shameful the way we've subtly and consistently lowered the expectations to the point where we can meet or exceed them without a whole lot of exertion, without leaving our couches or our cozy suburbs.

We need God to challenge us, to raise the bar to where we have to reach, to jump, to run out of our comfort zone to live up to the expectations. We need to be people and churches that don't settle for easy but instead are constantly pushing for more hard things to do for God. We helped set the bar so low and, with God's help, we can help lift it back up again.