No One Left at the Bottom

"Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil." (Ecclesiastes 4:9)

There is a kind of team course they run at camps, built out of ropes and towers and obstacles, and its whole design is to take a group of strangers and put them in situations hard enough that they have to learn to trust one another. And there is one rule that governs the entire thing. No obstacle is ever cleared by leaving somebody out.

You cannot bench the slow one. You cannot decide the heavy one is too much to lift and go on without him. The team has not cleared the wall until every single person has cleared the wall, and if one of them is still on the ground, none of them are finished. That is the rule, and it changes everyone who submits to it, because it makes the weakest member the whole team's concern instead of the whole team's problem.

That is a rule the church almost never actually adopts. We talk about the body of Christ, and then we quietly move on without the parts that slow us down. We route the difficult one to a different ministry. We stop inviting the awkward one. We are never unkind; we are simply, permanently, elsewhere. But you were bound into a body that does not get to leave anyone at the bottom. Look around for the person still on the ground, the one everyone has gently gone on without, and remember that you are not finished until they are over the wall too.

Matthew S.E. Waggoner

Matthew is a pastor in the Church of the Nazarene and the vision pastor of Falcon Community Church in Falcon, Colorado. He writes essays and devotionals on being formed by grace into the likeness of Christ.

https://www.gracethatforms.org
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They Would Not Stop Talking

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You Will Never Get to the Bottom of It