He Has Stopped Inviting Anybody

A man asked him on Tuesday what he does on a Friday evening.

He had the whole sentence ready. He has had it ready for about nine years, and it is a good sentence, and it makes what happens on a Friday sound like exactly what it is, which is one of the better things in his week.

He said, oh, nothing much. And changed the subject.

That is the fourth time in about a year, with four different people, three of whom he liked and one of whom he thinks would have loved it.

Here is what he wants understood first, because it is the important part and it is easy to get wrong.

He is not ashamed of what happens in that room.

What happens in that room is real. He would put it beside anything. Somebody was carried through the worst year of her life by those people last winter and there is a man there who was not speaking to anybody for two years and now runs the tea.

It is not the content. It is the counting.

If he invites somebody, they walk in, and they will count. Everybody counts. It is not a decision anybody makes, it is simply what a person's eyes do when they enter a room, and it takes about a second and a half.

And he knows exactly what happens on a face when it finishes counting. It is not unkindness. It is a very small adjustment round the eyes, and then they are gracious for an hour, and they do not come back.

He has watched that happen enough times that he has decided, without ever putting it into words until now, that he would rather not know.

So he says nothing much, and changes the subject.

If you have stopped asking anybody, come in and sit down. The cloth is down the middle and there is far too much food.

What He called them

There is a sentence where Christ addresses a group of people who were, by any measure anybody could apply, small, and the word He chooses is the whole point.

Fear not, little flock; for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom.Luke 12:32

Little flock.

He said that. He is looking at them, and He is not pretending. He does not call them a movement, or a beginning, or the seed of something. He calls them little, out loud, to their faces.

And then, in the same breath, He hands them the kingdom.

Notice that the smallness is not treated as an obstacle to the second half. There is no sequence in that sentence. It is not: grow, and then the kingdom. It is little flock, and it is your Father's good pleasure, and both are simply true at once.

You are in a room Christ would call little and hand a kingdom to in the same sentence. Luke 12:32 puts the word little directly beside the giving of the kingdom and treats neither as conditional on the other, and it is the Holy Spirit who kept the adjective in rather than removing it, which means the number in that room has already been named by somebody with more authority than any visitor.

What the counting actually measures

Now the second and a half at the door, because it is real and it is worth being precise about what it does and does not tell anybody.

A person entering a room counts. That is true and it is not going to stop being true.

What the count measures is attendance. That is all it can measure. It cannot see the winter that woman was carried through. It cannot see the man on the tea. It has no access to any of the things that actually make that room what it is, and it never will, and a visitor's face at one second and a half is reporting on a number and nothing else.

You have been treating a measurement of attendance as a verdict on a church. 1 Samuel 16:7 says man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart, and it is written of God deliberately refusing the visible measure in front of a prophet who had already made up his mind, and it is the same Spirit who came upon the son nobody had called in from the field, which means the thing a visitor's eyes can do in a second and a half is not the thing that decides anything.

Four people who were never asked

Here is the cost, said once and gently, because it is not a rebuke.

Four people, in a year. One of whom you think would have loved it.

You were protecting yourself and it cost somebody else an invitation, and nobody is being condemned for that tonight. John 1:46 has Nathanael asking whether any good thing can come out of Nazareth and Philip answering come and see rather than arguing with him, and it is the Holy Spirit who kept that exchange in the record as the whole of the method, which means the only thing ever required at a door was three words and never a defense of the number.