She Changes The Subject When They Ask

A woman asked her at the school gate, perfectly friendly, with no edge in it at all.

Where do you go on a Sunday? We are looking about.

And she said something vague, and asked about the woman's mother, and it was done in about four seconds and it was smooth and neither of them noticed anything.

She noticed in the car.

She has been doing it for years. She has never once decided to do it. There is no moment where she weighed it up and chose evasion, and if you had asked her a month ago whether she tells people where she goes she would have said of course.

Here is what she cannot work out, and it is the reason this has begun to bother her.

She is not ashamed of anything that happens in that room.

Not the preaching, which is better than most of what she hears anywhere else. Not the people, who she would put against anybody. There was a woman carried through the death of a child by those people last year and it was the most extraordinary thing she has ever watched.

So what is she avoiding?

She got to it, eventually, in the car, and it was smaller and more embarrassing than she expected.

The follow up question.

Because if she names it, the next thing anybody says is: oh, how many go there? And then she would have to say a number out loud, at a school gate, to a woman who is looking about, and she would watch that number land.

And so the whole thing gets steered round, permanently, by somebody who is not ashamed of a single thing in that building.

If you have been changing the subject, come in and pick up a knife. Nobody in this kitchen is asking you where you go.

What exactly he was not ashamed of

There is a sentence people quote as a general statement of confidence, and the specific object of it is the useful part.

For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth.Romans 1:16

Of the gospel of Christ.

That is what he names. Not of his meetings, not of the size of the churches he had planted, not of the accommodation. The thing he is not ashamed of is a message, and the reason given is what that message is: the power of God unto salvation.

And it is worth knowing what his churches actually looked like. Small groups in houses. Some of them a dozen people. He is writing to Rome from a position that would not have impressed anybody on paper, and he says the thing itself is the power of God.

You are holding something whose worth Scripture locates in what it is rather than in where it meets. Romans 1:16 attaches the not being ashamed to the gospel and gives its power as the reason, and it is the Holy Spirit who kept the object of that sentence as a message rather than as a congregation, which means what you have got has never been measurable by a room.

What the swerve is actually protecting

Now the four seconds at the gate, because it deserves to be understood rather than repented of.

You are not hiding the gospel. You have never hidden the gospel. If that woman had asked you what you believe, you would have told her, and you have told people before. What you are avoiding is a specific social moment: a number, said out loud, landing on a face. That is a much smaller thing than shame, and it is worth saying so plainly, because a woman who thinks she has been ashamed of Christ for years will carry that badly and it is not true.

You have been avoiding an awkward second rather than hiding a Savior, and those are not the same charge. Romans 1:16 puts the shame question on the gospel itself, and it is the Holy Spirit who kept it aimed there, which means what happens at that gate is a social reflex and not a denial, and it has never once been filed as one.

The question that never actually gets asked

Here is something worth testing, because it is doing a great deal of work.

How many go there?

You have been steering round a question that, in your own telling, has not yet been asked: the swerve happens at the first question, before anybody has got anywhere near the second. Most people asking where you go on a Sunday are asking for a name and a time. The number is your addition, and it arrives in advance, and it closes the conversation before the thing you were afraid of has had any chance to happen.

You have been answering a question nobody has asked yet, and the answer has been silence. Proverbs 29:25 says the fear of man bringeth a snare, but whoso putteth his trust in the Lord shall be safe, and it names the anticipation of what people will think as the trap rather than anything they actually do, and it is the same Spirit who gives boldness in the book of Acts, which means the snare has been made of a sentence nobody has said to you.