I grew up in a continent where Christianity is dying — not from persecution, but from comfort.

In Germany, as in most of Western Europe, the churches are emptying. Not because of pressure, not because of threat, but because the faith has been diluted so thoroughly over generations that there is nothing left worth believing in or fighting for. The state church offers a vague, agreeable spirituality that places no demands and makes no claims. The pews thin out year by year. The buildings remain; the life is gone.

This is what comfort does to faith. It makes it soft. It makes it manageable. It removes the edges, rounds off the corners, smooths away anything that might cause friction. And in doing so, it removes the thing itself. What remains is a cultural artifact — a habit, a tradition, a feeling — but not a living encounter with the living God.

The Cost of Costless Faith

Dietrich Bonhoeffer called it "cheap grace" — the grace that forgives without demanding discipleship, that absolves without transformation, that offers the benefits of Christianity while excusing you from its obligations. He wrote about it in 1937, in the context of the German church's capitulation to National Socialism. But it describes something much more pervasive and much more ordinary: the faith that costs nothing.

A faith that costs nothing is worth nothing. Not because suffering is inherently good, but because anything worth having requires the willingness to sacrifice for it. A marriage that no one has ever fought for is a marriage that has never really been tested. A conviction that no one has ever defended is not really a conviction — it is a preference.

The Christians I admire most are those who have had to pay something for their faith. The early church paid with their lives. The reformers paid with exile and sometimes with fire. The missionaries who carried the Gospel into hostile territory paid with comfort, safety, and often their health. What they had, they held — because holding it cost them something.

What I Found in America

When I came to Gainesville, I was struck by something I had not expected: a congregation that had chosen to pay a price. Not a dramatic price — no one was being martyred in Florida. But a real one: public ridicule, loss of community standing, media hostility, legal battles. They had put things on their lawn signs that made the whole city furious. They had sent their children to school in T-shirts that got them sent home. They had stood in a place that cost them something.

I am not saying every decision they made was wise. I am saying the willingness to pay a price for a conviction is something I had not seen in a long time. It reminded me that faith is supposed to cost something. It reminded me of what I had been missing.

Europe taught me what a faith that costs nothing eventually becomes. It becomes nothing. I do not want that kind of faith. I want the kind that is still standing when everything around it is falling.

"Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock." (Matthew 7:24–25)

Build on the rock. Whatever it costs.

— Heike Boecken, January 2012