Four years ago when we came to the US to pastor I was told by several people to strive to leave the church better than the way I recevied it. I believe that advice works for the minister as well. Yesterday we informed our beloved church that we would be leaving at the end of April in order to return to the mission fields of the Middle East. While we do so with a very heavy and broken heart, we can say that we are indeed leaving better than when we arrived here 4 years ago.

I have always known biblically, theologically that the church is absolutely essential. That faithfulness to Christ is faithfulness to His church. To love Jesus we must love His church. To serve Him, we do so by serving His church, His body, His bride. While I knew that and beleived that, my love for the church wasn’t near as passionate and intense as my love for those in the world who have never heard the gospel, those we call the unreached. For years I have prayed to have God’s heart, but how is that possible without a deep, sincere, intimate love for the church His Son died for?

When we arrived here 4 years ago, we had no idea why God would send us to Kincaid, Illinois. We had focused our entire Christian lives in fulfilling the call to be missionaries. We had sought education and experience to be the best missionaries we could be. We were living in the heart of the Islamic world in a city of millions of people one day, and in a town of 1500 people surrounded by corn fields the next. Why would God send us here? We struggled with that for a long time until we just accepted it with the thought we might not ever really know why.

But as I write this today I can say with confidence, I now know why. God had to make us better than when we came. He had to give us His heart for His church. God did this in the most unusual and unexpected way; through Kincaid Church of God. A small church in a tiny town most people don’t even know exist in the middle of America. God taught us to love His church through His church. We could have never learned to love the church the way God wanted in a classroom, or by reading a book, or even in the deserts of the Middle East. God had to send us to Kincaid to teach us to have His heart for His church, and He did it through His people that He calls “The Church of Jesus Christ”.

So now that our hearts overflow with love for His church, God is sending us back to the deserts of the Middle East. Back to the large cities full of millions of people to the hub of the Islamic world to do what we were not equipped to do before we came to Kincaid, Illinois. God is indeed sending us back better than we came.