Nine Things We Have Tried

There is a list, and he made it himself, and he wishes he had not.

It was a Sunday evening in February and he was tired and he wrote down every initiative of the last six years, honestly, because he wanted to see whether he was imagining the pattern.

Nine.

A monthly supper. A course, twice, with a different format the second time. A thing on a Saturday morning for men. A leaflet drop, properly done, eleven hundred houses. Moving the time. Moving it back. A social media effort that ran for fourteen months and was genuinely quite good. And the one with the school, which took most of a year and everybody was pleased with.

Not one of them was a bad idea. That is the thing he cannot get round. He has read about churches doing all nine and doing well out of them, and he has been to two of those churches.

There were eighteen people six years ago. There are seventeen now.

He sat with the list on his knee and the actual sentence that came was not about the church at all. It was: I have run out of things I have not tried.

And under it, quieter: if it was ever going to be me who did this, it would have happened by now.

Not by might, nor by power

Sit down in the courtyard a minute, because there is a word to Zerubbabel in Zechariah, and it is not spoken to a man who was being lazy.

Zerubbabel is in the middle of rebuilding the temple. It is going badly. It is small, and slow, and the people who remember the old one weep when they see the foundation of the new one, and he has been at it for years.

Then he answered and spake unto me, saying, This is the word of the Lord unto Zerubbabel, saying, Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the Lord of hosts.Zechariah 4:6

Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit.

That is said to a man with a project, in the middle of the work, who has not stopped and is not going to. It is not a rebuke for trying and there is no suggestion anywhere in the chapter that he should have done less.

It is a relocation. The thing that will actually do it has been moved out of his hands and named as somebody else's, and he is told that while he is still holding a plumb line.

Hear this in your own courtyard. You have not failed at anything, and the written word is what settles it. Scripture takes the doing out of might and power and puts it in His Spirit while the man is mid build, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has kept seventeen people together through six years of a hard road.

Now let me name what the list is doing, because it is not evidence of incompetence and nobody who has read those nine things would call you lazy.

A list of attempts becomes a list of verdicts the moment the count does not move.

Every one of those nine was sincere and most of them were well executed, and any one of them would be reported as a success story somewhere else with different people in a different town. But laid out on a Sunday evening on one page, they stop being nine efforts and become one accumulating case against a man, and the case is not true and it is very hard to argue with at nine o'clock at night.

Hear this too, and let it land where the list is. You are not the reason there are seventeen, and Scripture is what says so. What is written moves the doing out of might and power in the middle of a project, and the Spirit of God has never once made the size of a gathering the measure of the man tending it.

And let me be plain, because this subject is handled badly everywhere and it will not be handled badly here. Nobody on this page is promising you that the number will move. Not next year and not ever, and any article that promises you growth is selling something and should be closed.

And a smaller gathering has not failed. Seventeen people who have carried each other through six years is not a lesser thing than a full hall, and if your seventeen become twelve, that is not a verdict either, and there are faithful men in Scripture who ended with fewer than they started with.