The One O Clock Congregation

Every Sunday at five to one, two churches meet in a car park for about four minutes.

One is leaving. One is arriving.

The leaving one has been there since half past ten and is thinking about lunch. The arriving one has been driving for half an hour and is thinking about parking. They pass each other in the doorway. Somebody holds a door. Somebody says a word that is not quite a word, the sound English people make instead of speaking, and then everybody is where they were going.

Same building. Same carpet. Same hymn books in the same racks, though only one of the two ever opens them. Same cross on the same wall. The urn is still warm from the first lot when the second lot fills it.

And in eleven years, nobody has ever met anybody.

There have been arrangements, of course. There is a rota for the heating. There was a difficult conversation about the kitchen in 2019 that both sides still remember and neither side mentions. There is a shared calendar and a caretaker who knows everybody and has quietly held the whole thing together for a decade.

But meet? No.

Two congregations, one roof, one Lord, and a handover.

Now, my friend, let me ask you the thing.

Who uses your building after you leave it, and could you name one of them?

Paul had a word for people who share a house and act like strangers

Ephesians was written to a room with exactly this problem, though the line ran between nations rather than between service times.

Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God's people and also members of His household.Ephesians 2:19

Look at the two words Paul chooses to bury, because he chooses them carefully. Foreigners. Strangers. One is a legal status and the other is a social one, and between them they cover everything a person can be to somebody they share a street with and do not know.

And he does not say you ought not to be strangers. He says you are not. Present tense. Already done, already ruled on, already a fact about you before you had an opinion about it.

That is your standing right now, in that car park, at five to one. You are not a congregation politely sharing a facility with another congregation. Scripture says you are members of the same household, and the Holy Spirit who lives in you is the same Spirit filling that room at half past one, and the wall between you came down at the cross before either group booked the hall.

The handover is not a boundary. It is a timetable that has been mistaken for one.

And I want to say clearly, because this house never prosecutes anybody's church: nothing has gone wrong here. Nobody has failed. Two congregations sharing a roof without becoming friends is not a scandal, it is the most natural thing in the world, and the same thing happens in every office and every apartment block in every city on earth.

The gentleness of that is exactly why it needs saying out loud. Nothing will ever break a habit that nobody is embarrassed about.

So let me say the encouraging thing, because you need it more than you need the diagnosis.

You have already crossed harder lines than this one. You have. Somewhere in your life there is a person you love now who you would not have sat beside once, and the word says the Spirit was poured out on all people, and He is the One who did that crossing in you, and He did not consult you about it first.

A stable in Los Angeles in 1906 filled up with people who were not supposed to be in one room, and the seating chart of that city could not survive four walls with the Spirit inside them. Nobody negotiated it. It fell, and then it was true.

You are standing on that same ground, four minutes a week, holding a door.