Afraid Of Building A Cage

They asked her to say how it is going to run.

That was five months ago. There is a page, and there is very little on it, and every few weeks she opens it and looks at it and closes it again.

Here is what happens every time she writes a line down.

She hears it as a rule.

Not as a plan or an arrangement. As a rule, landing on a specific person, on a bad week, in a way she can picture exactly. She writes we will start at seven and she hears somebody arriving at ten past and feeling it. She writes anything at all and she is instantly at the wrong end of it.

Because she has been at the wrong end of it.

She is not going to describe that here and it is not necessary. It is enough to say that she knows precisely what a small rule feels like when you are underneath it and somebody else is holding it, and she has promised herself she will never be on the other end of that.

So she has not written anything.

And here is what she has to look at now, five months in, and it is worse than the page.

Nobody knows what is happening on a Thursday.

People turn up at different times. Two of them have stopped coming, not out of any grievance, but because there is nothing to come to at any particular hour. The woman who was going to help does not know what she is helping with. And every one of those is a cost, and every one of them is being paid by exactly the people she was protecting.

If you are afraid of building a cage, come and hold the end of this table. Nobody here is asking you for a plan.

What a council decided to put on people

There is a moment in Acts where a group of leaders has to decide exactly what to require of people, and the sentence they land on is one of the most careful in the New Testament.

For it seemed good to the Holy Ghost, and to us, to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things.Acts 15:28

Read what they are doing. They are not refusing to decide. They have a list, and the list is short, and they write it down and send it.

And the phrase in the middle is the thing. No greater burden than these necessary things.

They have thought about the weight. They have asked, explicitly, what is the minimum, and then laid that and nothing more. They are people who know exactly what an over-loaded rule does, because most of them had been under one, and their answer is not to decide nothing.

Their answer is to decide the smallest true thing and send it with love.

You are being shown a council that took the weight seriously and still wrote something down. Acts 15:28 puts no greater burden than these necessary things into a decision that was made rather than avoided, and the Holy Spirit is named inside the verse as deciding alongside them, which means the fear you have been carrying is the right instinct and the paralysis is not what the instinct is for.

What five months of nothing has actually cost

Now the page, and let us be honest about the arithmetic, because it is not what it looks like.

You have been comparing two things: a cage, and no cage. And on that comparison, nothing wins every time. But nothing is not the second option. The second option is what has actually been happening for five months: people arriving at different times, two of them drifting, a woman waiting to be told what she is helping with. That is also a weight. It is simply distributed differently, and it falls hardest on the people with the least confidence to ask.

You have been protecting people from one kind of burden by handing them another one nobody named. Galatians 6:2 says bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ, and it puts the carrying of a load into the hands of those able to carry it, and it is the same Spirit who knits a people together, which means a structure carried by the leader is a load taken off everybody else rather than laid on them.

Nothing here prescribes a shape

Let us be plain about what is not being said, because a woman in your position will be scanning for it.

Nobody is telling you what to put on that page. There is no recommended structure here, no model, and no view about whether a thing should be tight or loose. Some groups need a great deal of shape and some need almost none, and this article has no opinion and is not going to develop one.

You are the one who decides the shape, and Scripture leaves that with the people actually there. Acts 15:28 has a council deciding for their own situation rather than issuing a universal system, and it is the same Spirit who is named as leading them in it, which means what goes on that page is between you and Him and the people in that hall.