The Room We Got Good At

In 1906 the fire fell in a building that had been a livery stable.

There were planks laid across nail kegs for seats. There was sawdust on the floor because there had been horses on the floor. The man preaching had one eye, and he was the son of former slaves, and he had learned most of what he knew sitting in a corridor outside a classroom he was not permitted to enter.

And the thing the people who came could not get over, the thing they wrote home about, the thing the newspapers went after him for, was not the noise.

It was who was in the room together.

Black and white, rich and poor, immigrant and native born, women preaching and men weeping, in a city that had rules about all of that, on planks across nail kegs, in a building that smelled of horses.

That is the fire. Not the volume. The crossing.

Now come to a Sunday morning about a hundred and twenty years later, and sit in row six with a woman who has been in that congregation since she was nine.

She knows when the key change is coming. She could tell you to the second. She knows which song comes second and which prayer opens the offering time and what the pastor does with his glasses when he is about to land the point, and she loves him, and she loves this church, and she is not being unkind about any of it.

She is just aware that she has stopped expecting anything.

She used to come with her stomach turning over. She used to arrive early. There was a season, and she can date it, when people stayed for two hours afterwards in the car park because nobody could work out how to go home yet, and somebody would start something up on the bonnet of a car and it would go on and nobody minded.

She could not tell you when that stopped. That is the part that frightens her. There was no argument, nobody left, nothing bad happened. They just got very good at it.

And now she sits in row six in a building she would defend to anybody, feeling something she has no word for, which is not anger and is not doubt, and is closest to homesickness for a room she is currently sitting in.

You know that feeling, and I am not going to make you say anything unkind about your church to admit it.

You can love the people, mean the songs, respect the preaching, give your time, defend the place to strangers, and still know exactly what it was like when it was alive.

That is not disloyalty. That is memory, and memory is a gift, and yours is working.

Somebody wrote to a man who had gone quiet

Before the teaching, hear where you stand. You are not a person who has lost anything. Second Timothy says fan into flame the gift of God which is in you, and the Holy Spirit has never taken back what He put in somebody.

There is a letter written by an old man in a cell to a younger one who had gone flat, and it is the tenderest thing in the world.

He does not tell him he has failed. He does not tell him to find a better congregation. He does not diagnose the church at Ephesus or list what has gone wrong there. He says one thing, and it is a thing about the young man's own hands.

Stir up the gift of God that is in you through the laying on of my hands, for God did not give us a spirit of timidity but of power and love and a sound mind.2 Timothy 1:6 and 7

Stir up. The word is what you do to a fire that is still there.

You do not stir up a fire that has gone out. You stir up one that has burned down under its own ash, where the heat is still in the bed of it and the air has stopped moving. And what it takes is not a new fireplace. It takes somebody willing to get down on the hearth and move it about.

That is the first mercy in this: the fire did not leave your building. It banked.

And the second mercy is where the letter puts the responsibility, because it does not put it on the room. It puts it in his own chest. What is in you. The gift that is in you. Not the meeting, not the leadership, not the culture, not the year everything changed. In you, where you are already sitting, in row six, on a Sunday you can predict.

Nobody has to leave anywhere for that to happen.

And there is one more thing, and it comes straight off the sawdust floor. When the fire fell in that stable it did not fall on a technique. It fell on a room where people crossed the line they were not supposed to cross and sat down next to each other.

So if you want to know where to look for the banked heat in your own congregation, it is not usually in the music. It is in the person three rows back you have quietly stopped expecting anything from.

And you have it still, whatever the room sounds like. The word says the gift is in you already and calls for stirring rather than replacing, and the Spirit has never been driven out of a building by a format.