If I Cannot Do The Group

She reads every notice. That is the part nobody would guess.

The board at the back, the sheet, the thing that goes round on a Sunday. She reads all of it and she wants most of it, genuinely, in the way you want a place you can see through a window.

Men's breakfast, which is not for her. Women's group, second Thursday, about twenty five. The prayer meeting, which is fourteen people in a room with a hard ceiling. A course starting in September, eight weeks, twelve to sixteen people, tea and biscuits at the start which means arriving early and standing.

She has ruled out every single one of them, and she does it fast now. Four seconds. She reads it, something in her does the arithmetic, and she moves on.

It is not fear. She has thought about that carefully because a woman at her old church once told her it was, kindly, and it took her about two years to work out that it was not.

It is a budget. A room of twenty costs her a day and a half and she has three of those a week to spend, and she spends two of them on work and one on her mother.

Here is where it has landed, and it landed properly in about March.

She has concluded that the whole category is closed to her. All of it. That there is a thing called Christian fellowship and it happens in rooms of twelve to twenty five, and she is a person who cannot do rooms of twelve to twenty five, and therefore she has read notices for six years and been to almost none of it and drawn the obvious conclusion.

She has never once considered asking one person to do one thing.

Not because she decided against it. Because it has never appeared on a notice board, and everything she knows about how this works came off a notice board.

Barnabas took him and brought him, and that is one man

Sit down on that bench a minute, because there is a verse where the whole future of the church turns on one man doing one thing with one other man, and there is no room in it at all.

Saul has just been converted and nobody believes it. The disciples in Jerusalem are afraid of him and they are right to be, on the evidence, and he cannot get in anywhere.

But Barnabas took him, and brought him to the apostles, and declared unto them how he had seen the Lord in the way.Acts 9:27

Barnabas took him, and brought him.

One man. Not a committee, not a process, not a group that Saul had to be able to walk into on his own. Barnabas took him. It is a verb about a hand on an elbow, and the whole of the New Testament that follows comes out of that afternoon.

Hear this on your own bench. You are not outside the category, and the written word is what settles it. Scripture has the church's most decisive introduction happening one to one, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moved on Barnabas to do it, so the room of twenty was never the only shape of this.

Now let me be careful about the woman who told you it was fear, because you were right and she was not, and being right about that took you two years.

You know the difference between a thing you are avoiding and a thing that costs more than you have, and nothing written in Scripture confuses the two, and the Holy Spirit has never confused them either. Avoidance shrinks the world and gets easier the more you do it. A budget is arithmetic: you can spend it, once, and then it is gone, and the next two days are the price.

Nobody in this article is going to tell you that a hard ceiling and twenty five people is a spiritual test you are failing.

Hear this too, and let it change what you are reading the notice board for. You have not been shut out of anything, and Scripture is what says so. What is written puts the hinge of church history in one man taking one man somewhere, and the Spirit of God has never once required a group before He would do something between two people.

And now the thing that has actually been happening for six years, which is not a capacity problem.

Everything you know about fellowship came off a board, and boards only ever advertise the things that need advertising. A room of twenty needs a notice. Two people walking somewhere does not, and it therefore never appears anywhere, and a person who learns from notice boards will conclude it does not exist.

It is the commonest form in the written word and the least advertised form in any church in the country, and the Holy Spirit has been using it the whole time. You have not been excluded from it. You have never been told it was there.