It Got Down To Three

It was eleven for about four years, which he now understands was a good run and did not understand at the time.

Then the Robertsons moved. Then a woman he had known for a decade started at a different place and told him kindly and he told her that was absolutely fine and meant it. Then two people just stopped, the way people stop, without a conversation, and he sent one message each and then decided not to send a second because a second one makes it about him.

Wednesday evenings are now three.

Him. Margaret, who is eighty one and who has not missed one in nine years, including the week after her husband. And Terry, who says almost nothing, and who once said something in the fourth year that changed how three other people prayed for about a month.

The kettle is too big for three. That is the detail that gets him. It takes ages and he still fills it.

Here is what he has noticed himself doing since about February, and he does not like it.

He has stopped calling it anything. It used to be the Wednesday group. Now, if somebody asks, he says something about a couple of people who still come round, and he says it in a particular voice, a flattening voice, that gets the sentence over with.

And in the last month a second thing has arrived, which is a sentence he has ready. It goes: we might give it a rest over the summer and see. He has not said it to anybody. It is fully drafted.

Margaret arrives at ten to. She always has. She brings the same biscuits.

Two or three, and He is not describing a shortfall

Sit down in your own chair a minute, because the sentence everybody quotes at small rooms is worth reading for what it actually promises, and it is not a consolation.

For where two or three are gathered together in My name, there am I in the midst of them.Matthew 18:20

Two or three.

Now, He could have said any number. He is the one speaking and He picks the smallest number at which a gathering exists at all, and He attaches Himself to it.

Hear this with the kettle still going. You are not running the remains of something, and the written word is what settles it. Scripture puts the presence of Christ in the middle of two or three, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been in that front room every Wednesday since it was eleven and every Wednesday since it was three.

Now let me name the flattening voice, because you heard yourself do it and that is worth taking seriously.

You are pre apologizing. You have started explaining the size before anybody asks about it, and the reason is not shame about Margaret or Terry, it is that you have quietly accepted a scoreboard that the written word does not run and the Holy Spirit has never kept.

And here is what that scoreboard costs. A man who is apologizing for a room cannot be present in it. He is half in the room and half in an imagined conversation with somebody outside it, and Margaret has been in the same chair for nine years talking to a man who is partly somewhere else.

Hear this too, and let it stop the drafting. You have not failed at anything, and Scripture is what says so. What is written attaches the presence of Christ to two or three without one word about what the number used to be, and the Spirit of God has never once graded a room by its previous attendance.

And now something I want said plainly, because this site will not have it any other way.

None of this is a word against a full building. A church of nine hundred is not a compromise and a church of three is not a purer form of anything. The room that seats four hundred and the room with the too big kettle have the same Lord standing in the middle of them, and He is not comparing.

What is being taken off you is only this: the idea that three is a stage on the way to somewhere, or the wreckage of somewhere you have been.

Three is a gathering. It has a name because the written word gives it one, and the Holy Spirit has been keeping it for nine years through a widow who has not missed a week.