You Are In the Credits
The movie ends, the music swells, the screen goes dark, and the first white letters start to climb. Half the theater is already moving. Popcorn tubs get stacked or thrown away as people beeline it to the bathrooms and parking lot. Mary Kay likes to stay and watch the credits all the way through. Gaffer. Key grip. Script supervisor. Location manager. Somebody whose entire job title is “craft services,” which means that at four in the morning, when everybody else was cold and cranky and ready to quit, somebody had hot coffee waiting to put in Ryan Reynolds’ hand. You walked into the theater to see two or three stars. But the movie you loved, the one that made you laugh or cry or grip the armrest, was put on by hundreds of people you will never meet. Somebody hung the lights. Somebody laid the cable. Somebody made sure the actor had a place to stand. None of them are on the poster. Pull enough of them out, and there is no movie.
Peter understood this about the church. He wrote to scattered Christians, outsiders in their own towns, people with every reason to keep their heads down and wait for somebody else to carry the torch. He didn’t write one instruction for the leaders and another for everybody else. He wrote this: “Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others, as faithful stewards of God’s grace in its various forms” (1 Peter 4:10). There is no poster section in that sentence and no credits section. Every person in those scattered churches had been handed something, and every role was needed. Take enough of them out, and the church Peter was writing to doesn’t survive the week.
Our churches work the same way. Those of us out front are the faces. But I would bet you can name somebody whose name is on nothing, and without whom the place does not run. The one who is here before the doors open. The one who fixes the thing before anybody knows it’s broken. The one who notices you weren’t here last week and sends the text. In the church, no one is in the audience. You’re in the credits.
Who is the person that, if they stopped showing up, you would only then realize how much they make a big impact? Tell them how much you appreciate them.
Blessings,