Forty Two In The Chat

Forty two people. She counted them on a Sunday night in bed, which is the sort of thing you do at eleven o'clock when you are not going to sleep anyway.

The chat is good. That is what makes it hard to complain about. There are birthdays in it. There are photographs of somebody's dog. There is a running thing about a restaurant that four of them went to in 2022 which is still funny. When she posts something, eleven people react within about a minute, and it is not performative, they mean it.

She is thirty four and she has not had a bad week in six months without at least nine people knowing she had a bad week, because she says so in there, and they say the kind things, and she feels better for about forty minutes.

Then in February her flat flooded at two in the morning.

She stood in about an inch of water in the dark with her phone in her hand, and she opened the chat, and she looked at it, and she closed it again. Because what do you put. And who is it aimed at. And she was not going to wake forty two people, and she could not think of a way to wake one.

She sat on the arm of the sofa until half past five and then rang the emergency number on the building notice, and a man came at seven and was very kind, and she made him a cup of tea and he told her about his daughter.

That is when she cried. Not at two. At half past seven, at a stranger being pleasant, which is a thing that happens to people who are known by nobody and it always catches them from the side.

The early church did this house by house

There is a description of the first church in Acts which is usually read as a picture of enthusiasm, and it is, but look at the actual logistics in it.

And they, continuing daily with one accord in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, did eat their meat with gladness and singleness of heart.Acts 2:46

Hear that where you are lying at eleven o'clock. You are not deficient for needing a house as well as a temple. The word puts the temple and the breaking of bread from house to house in one sentence, and it is the Holy Spirit who has built it that way since the first week.

Two things, and both of them, every day. The temple, which is the big room, the crowd, the shared thing. And house to house, which is four people at somebody's kitchen table with the plates still out.

They did not treat the second as a lesser version of the first. It is in the same sentence, joined by an and, and the gladness gets attached to the eating in the houses.

So take this where you are, and know it is not my sympathy, it is what is written: you are not deficient for needing a house. His word puts the temple and the kitchen table in the same breath, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been building a body in which no one gets known at scale, because nobody ever has been.

Forty two is a temple. You have a temple. What you do not have is a house.

There was a man in England in the seventeen hundreds who had a night in a small meeting where his heart, as he wrote it, was strangely warmed, and who then built something, and the piece of it that carried the load was not the crowds in the fields, though there were tens of thousands of those.

It was six or seven people in a room, once a week, called a class meeting.

No teaching in it. No expert, no platform, no curriculum. A handful of people sat down and were asked out loud how it truly stood with them, and each one answered, and the others heard it.

And the arithmetic of that movement is the thing to look at. The crowds were enormous. The rooms were six. He understood, in a way that most of us have forgotten, that a person can be inside an enormous thing and never once be inside a small one, and that the small one is where a human being actually gets held.

The nickname was coined to mock how methodical they were. They kept it, because it was accurate.

A warmed heart with no method cools. A method with no warmth is only a schedule. He held both, and the hinge was a house.

Now hear me clearly, because this is where I could do you damage. I am not telling you to join a small group. I am not handing you a night of the week or a sign up sheet or a curriculum, and if what you needed was a program you would have solved this in 2022. His word says house to house, and it is His Spirit who does the work in it, and one name is the whole beginning.