Nobody Asked You

Marlene has put the chairs out in the small hall on a Thursday for nine years.

Forty-one of them, in four rows, because forty-one is what fits once you accept that the piano is where the piano actually is rather than where the plan says it should be. She worked that out in her first month with a tape measure and a bad back, and she has never mentioned it to a living soul.

She is not on a committee. She is not on any list. There is no word for what she is, and if you asked her what she does at that church she would say she helps out on Thursdays, which is true, and which is also about nine years of her life.

In March there was a laminated sheet taped to the inside of the door. New arrangements from the first of the month. Thursday group moving to Tuesday evenings on account of the hall hire and the boiler contract, with thanks to all concerned.

She read it twice, standing there with her coat still on.

What went through her was not anger. She is clear about that on the nights she thinks about it, because she is not an angry woman and she genuinely likes the people who wrote that sheet. What went through her was much plainer than anger, and it was this.

In nine years, nobody has ever asked her anything.

Not about the chairs. Not about the piano. Not about which of the eleven regulars can physically get there on a Tuesday.

Because she knows that. She knows that Doreen's lift runs on a Thursday and does not run on any other day of the week. She knows it the way you know your own kitchen in the dark, and she has known it for four years, and there has never been anywhere to put it, because telling somebody requires a moment where somebody is asking.

Two weeks later she stood in that hall with the sentence in her mouth.

Fourteen words. She had them ready. She had said them out loud in the car on the way over, which embarrassed her so much she turned the radio up.

Then the meeting ended and the kettle went on and the moment came and went, and she carried those fourteen words back out to the car park and drove home and put them in the drawer with all the others.

Most people have one of those. Some room lived in for years, doing something real, holding something nobody else knows, and a sentence that has never once got out, because nobody has ever turned round and asked.

The title was never the door

Let me say first what I am not doing.

Nobody here is being told to go and get a seat. This page does not know that church and does not know the people leading it, and a stranger who tells somebody to go and make a case in a room he has never sat in is playing with something he will not have to live in afterwards. No strategy is being handed over here. There is nothing against the people who wrote that sheet, and honestly, there never was.

I want to give you back something smaller than a strategy and a great deal harder to take off you.

You have not been waiting for permission, you have been waiting for a question, and only one of those was ever in the way. 1 Corinthians 12:18 says God hath set the members every one of them in the body, as it hath pleased him, and it puts the setting on Him rather than on anybody’s invitation, and it is the same Spirit who is said two verses earlier to have baptized us all into one body.

Look at how Paul describes a body, and notice that he is not being kind about it. He is being accurate.

On the contrary, the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and the parts we think less honourable we clothe with greater honour. God has put the body together, giving greater honour to the part that lacked it, so that there would be no division in the body, but that its parts would have the same care for one another.1 Corinthians 12:22

Read that again slowly, because there is a hand in it.

God has put the body together. Not the committee. Not the rota, not the badge, not whoever holds the keys to the cupboard. The joining is His work, and He did it deliberately, and He weighted it on purpose towards exactly the part everybody assumed was decorative.

You are not there on sufferance, you are load bearing, and the body finds that out when the part nobody could name is gone. 1 Corinthians 12:22 says those members of the body, which seem to be more feeble, are necessary, and it is the Holy Spirit who kept the word necessary rather than a softer one, which means what you have been holding is structural.

There is a moment in the history of this tradition that is worth about one sentence and no more. When the church here lost its crown and its money and its legal footing all at once, and a handful of people sat down in a room to build the thing again out of nothing, they did something that was genuinely strange at the time. They put people with no titles in the room where it got built, and gave them a vote in it. Not as a courtesy. Because they had just watched the whole structure fall over, and they had learned something about what actually holds a thing up.

That instinct is not a museum piece. It is still available in an ordinary room on an ordinary Thursday.

You are in Christ and Christ is in you, and that is not a lower grade of membership than the one printed on a badge. 1 Corinthians 12:18 says God hath set the members every one of them in the body, as it hath pleased him, and it is the same Spirit who divides to every man severally as He chooses, which means the One who put the body together put you in it Himself, and no list can now un-put you.

So the nine years were not you waiting at the edge of something.

The nine years were you already inside it, doing the load bearing work in the dark, while a small wrong idea sat in your chest calling you staff. 1 Corinthians 12:24 says God hath tempered the body together, having given more abundant honor to that part which lacked, and it is the Holy Spirit who kept the weighting deliberate rather than accidental, which means nothing about those Thursdays was preliminary.