Fourteen, And Christ In The Middle

The boiler in that building gave out on a Tuesday in February, and by the Friday it was plain that nothing was going to be warm by Sunday.

So Ada said, come to mine.

Nine of them went. Nine, in a front room built for four, with the tea things pushed down to the far end of the table and somebody's wet coats steaming on the backs of the chairs, and Nell sat on a footstool because she got there last.

They said the prayers they always say. Ada's grandson read the lesson, lost his place twice, went scarlet, and got to the end of it. Mr. Frayne, who has not said a word out loud in a meeting in eleven years, prayed for his brother in Carlisle, and his voice went halfway through, and nobody made a fuss about it. Ada just put her hand flat on the table next to him and left it there until he had finished.

Nell walked home under the streetlights with her scarf pulled up over her chin, and she was undone. Properly undone. She could not have told you why.

And then she got to her own gate, put her key in the lock, and thought, in words, as clearly as if somebody standing behind her had said it: well, that wasn't really church.

She has kept the register of that chapel on Main Street for nine years. Hardbacked book, date on the left, number on the right. Eleven. Sixteen. Nine. Fourteen. Fourteen. Twelve.

In January a form had come through with a box on it that said average Sunday attendance, and she wrote 14 in the box and then sat at her own kitchen table for a while, not doing anything, just sitting with it, because a number in a box has a way of looking back at you like a verdict.

You know whether this is you. It is not despair and it is nothing so dramatic. It is a quiet arrangement you have made inside your own head, where the thing you are actually standing in is the thing before the real thing, and you keep going, faithfully, week after week, in a waiting room you have never once called a waiting room out loud.

He named a number, and it is smaller than yours

Here is what I want to put in your hands, and it is not encouragement and it is not a strategy. It is one sentence Jesus said, and He said it about a room.

Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am in their midst.Matthew 18:20

Two.

Not two hundred. And not two hundred as the goal with two as the sad little floor underneath it. He named two, and then He said what happens in a room with two in it, and what happens is that He is standing in the middle of it.

Look at who is doing what in that sentence, because that is the whole thing. The two are gathering. That is their entire contribution and it is not much: turning up in a cold room in His name. Every other verb belongs to Him. There I am. Present tense, first person, no conditions, no minimum, no review.

Which means a room is not made a church by the number of people in it. It is made a church by the One standing in the middle of it, and He does not arrive in proportion.

You are in a room He does not arrive at in proportion, because He is not divided among four thousand and not rationed out among nine. Matthew 18:20 says where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them, and it is the Holy Spirit who kept the number at two rather than at a quorum, which means a congregation of four thousand is a church for exactly the same reason yours is and not for a better one. There is nothing here against anybody, and if you have been carrying a small hard feeling about the big building across town, put it down. It is heavy, it was never yours to hold, and it is not the thing that has been hurting you anyway.

What has been hurting you is the register.

A number written down every week for nine years starts to behave like a grade, and the One in the middle of that room has never once counted it as an absence. Matthew 18:20 attaches no minimum, no review and no condition to the promise, and it is the same Spirit who bears witness with your spirit, which means the standard you have felt yourself marked against was never issued.

I am not going to promise you that the building fills. That is not mine to promise and it is not yours to produce. I am not going to tell you it ought to stay just as it is either. God does what God does with a room, in His own way and in His own time, and that has never actually been the question you were asking.

The question you were asking is whether what you have counts.

It counts, and it has counted the entire time. Matthew 18:20 puts every verb except gathering on Christ Himself and says there am I in the present tense, and it is the Holy Spirit who preserved it as a statement rather than as an encouragement, which means what you have was never a rehearsal for something realer. When those parishes lost the crown, the money and the legal ground all inside a few years, a great many of them were exactly nine people in somebody's front room with no idea what they were any more, and they were not a rehearsal for the church that came afterwards. They were the church. The building came later, and the building was good, and the church was already there before there was a roof over it.

And it was there in Ada's front room, Nell. That is the part I want you to hear. Not in spite of the nine and the footstool and the steaming coats. In them. Mr. Frayne prayed out loud after eleven years of silence. A boy read badly and finished. A woman put her hand on a table and left it there. And you walked home undone because you had been standing in the presence of the living God, and your body knew it a good ten minutes before your head got the chance to overrule it.

The head overruled it at the gate. That is all that happened. The counting simply got there first.

You felt the truth in that front room before the arithmetic caught up with you. Matthew 18:20 locates Christ in the midst of two or three and names no building, and it is the same Spirit who is called the Comforter, which means what came over you walking home was accurate and the overruling was not.