Nobody Here Can Teach

Five of them, in a front room, on a Tuesday, and not one of them has any business teaching anybody anything.

He is careful about this. He is the one who started it and he is the one who is careful, and the carefulness is real and it is not false modesty. He works in logistics. He has read a fair amount and he knows exactly how much that is worth, which is: it is worth something and it is not training, and he has watched people who read a fair amount do harm.

So they play a recording.

Forty minutes, usually, off a phone into a small speaker that somebody brought and left. It is good. The man on it is genuinely good and none of them could do it and that is the point.

And then it ends.

And there is a thing that happens in the room in the four seconds after it ends, and he has been watching it for eighteen months. The room goes slightly flat. Somebody says that was good. Somebody else says yes. And then they talk about the week, warmly and well, and pray at the end, and it is a good evening.

But the forty minutes and the rest of the evening never quite join up.

Last month one of them, a woman in her fifties who says about four things a year, said something after the recording finished. She said: I do not know what any of that means for Tuesday.

He said something about it being deep.

He has thought about her sentence roughly every day since, because she was not being difficult. She was asking the only question that matters, and there was nobody in the room whose job it was to answer it, and he has arranged the entire evening around the fact that this is nobody's job.

Unlearned and ignorant men, and what the council actually noticed

Sit down on that rug a minute, because there is a verse about two men in front of the most qualified room in Jerusalem, and the sentence has two halves and everybody quotes the first one.

Peter and John are before the council. These are the people who decide what is sound. The two men in front of them have no training whatsoever and everybody in that chamber knows it.

Now when they saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were unlearned and ignorant men, they marvelled; and they took knowledge of them, that they had been with Jesus.Acts 4:13

Unlearned and ignorant men. That is the first half and it is not a slur, it is a technical description: men without formal training in the schools.

But read what the council actually took knowledge of.

Not that they were clever. Not that they had learned quickly. They took knowledge of them, that they had been with Jesus, and it was visible enough across a room to be the thing the experts remarked on.

Hear this in your own front room. That room is not disqualified, and the written word is what settles it, not encouragement. Scripture has the trained council noticing time spent with Christ rather than credentials, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been in five people on a Tuesday for eighteen months.

Now let me say the careful thing, because you have been careful and you were right to be.

You are right that reading a fair amount is not training. You are right that untrained people can do harm and you have watched it, and nothing written in Scripture pretends otherwise, and the Holy Spirit is not asking you to appoint yourself. A site with this name would be the worst possible place to hear that a bit of confidence is all anybody needs.

Keep the recording. The man is good, you said so, and there is no reason on earth to stop borrowing from someone who has spent his life on it. The written word is entirely comfortable with a church learning from teachers it did not produce.

Hear this too, though, because it is the gap she put her finger on. Playing forty minutes is not the same as being devoted to it, and Scripture is what says so. What is written has the church continuing steadfastly in the apostles' doctrine as something they did together, and the Spirit of God has never once required a qualified man in the room before He would open a text to the people in it.

And now the actual missing piece, which is not teaching and which you have been treating as though it were.

She did not ask for a lecture. She asked what it means for Tuesday.

Answering that is not teaching. It is the ordinary work of five people who have been with Jesus, saying out loud, in a front room, what a thing means where they actually live. Nobody needs a qualification to say I think this means I have to ring my brother.

That is what the room went flat for want of, and it has been available the whole time.