The Table And The Building

He does both, and he has done both for thirty years, and about four years ago he started keeping score.

Not on paper and not out loud. But he could tell you, if you got him at the right hour, which of the two has been better lately, and he has a running sense of the gap, and it has begun to affect what he says to people.

Somebody asked him in the spring where he goes and he said the name of the church and then heard himself add: and we do a thing at ours on Wednesdays, which is honestly where the real stuff happens.

He drove home turning that sentence over.

He did not believe it, quite. That is what bothered him. It is not that he thinks his front room outranks a congregation of three hundred, and he would argue against anybody who said so in those words.

But he had said it, in that order, with that word real in it, and it came out easily, which means it had been forming for a while.

Thirty years of both. Four years of a scoreboard. And a sentence in a car park in the spring that told him where the scoreboard had got to.

Daily in the temple, and in every house

Sit down in that circle a minute, because Luke ends a whole chapter with one sentence that puts both rooms in it, and there is no comparison anywhere in the line.

And daily in the temple, and in every house, they ceased not to teach and preach Jesus Christ.Acts 5:42

Daily in the temple. And in every house.

Two locations, one activity, one conjunction. They ceased not to teach and preach, in both, without ranking, without a preference expressed, and without the smallest hint that one of them was where the real thing happened.

And notice they were in the temple daily, and the temple is the large public institutional gathering of that entire nation, and Luke reports it without a note of apology or qualification.

Hear this in your own front room. You are not disloyal to either room, and the written word is what settles it. Scripture puts the temple and the house in one sentence joined by an and, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has had you in both faithfully for thirty years.

Now let me name what the scoreboard is, because it did not come from arrogance and arrogance would be a poor word for a man who has kept two commitments for three decades.

A scoreboard comes from measuring two things with one instrument.

You have been asking one question of both rooms, and the question is: how much did I feel. And there is no version of that comparison a Wednesday front room does not win, because twelve people and a low table and two hours will always produce more felt warmth than three hundred people and a service that has to begin and end on time. The written word measured neither room that way, and the Spirit of God has been in both of them with you for thirty years.

But felt warmth is not what a Sunday is for.

A large gathering does what a front room structurally cannot. It carries the ones who cannot speak yet. It puts a widow in the same room as a teenager. It sings something in three hundred voices that twelve cannot make. It survives the year that your Wednesday group does not, because half of them move and two fall out and it quietly ends, and the building is still there in October and the doors are open.

Hear this too, and let it land where you drove home. You have not been unfaithful to anybody, and Scripture is what says so. What is written joins the temple and the house with an and and reports both without apology, and the Spirit of God has never once asked a man to choose between two rooms he has been given.

And the word real, since that is the one that came out of your mouth in the spring.

That word is doing all the work in that sentence and it is not carrying any argument. You did not mean the doctrine is truer on a Wednesday, and you would not defend that. You meant it feels closer, which is true, and which is a fact about scale, and which you accidentally turned into a fact about authenticity in front of somebody who may well be repeating it.