Say The Number Out Loud

The fourth seat is a piano stool, because there are only three chairs in the front room and nobody has ever got round to it.

Wednesday, twenty past seven. The kettle has boiled once already and will boil again at about half eight, which is the rhythm of the evening and has been for two years. Four mugs. A plate with the biscuits still in their packet on it, which is the kind of detail that tells you exactly how much fuss is being made, which is none.

Him. His wife. The widower from two doors down, who arrives eight minutes early every single week and stands on the step rather than knock early. And the girl of nineteen, who found them because somebody put a card in the window of the shop on the corner and she read it twice before she came.

Four.

A fortnight ago the girl brought a friend, and the friend sat through the whole of it perfectly politely, and at the door, putting her coat on, she said: so is this, like, a church? Or.

And the sentence just stopped there. Nobody finished it. He said something about how they were only small and then laughed in a way he did not enjoy hearing himself do, and shut the door, and has thought about it every Wednesday since.

He drives past the big church on the ring road on the way to the shop. Car park full. Windows lit right along the side. A man in a high visibility jacket waving people into spaces in the rain, cheerful about it. And every time he thinks, without bitterness and without meaning any harm by it, that is a church, and mine is four people and a kettle.

Then last week the widower prayed out loud for his son.

He is not good at praying out loud. He starts sentences he cannot finish. He got about two lines in, said his son's name, and then just stopped, and the stopping was not awkward, it was the loudest thing in the room. Nobody rushed to fill it. The girl of nineteen put her hand over her mouth and cried without any noise at all. The standing lamp buzzed slightly, the way it does. The kettle clicked off in the kitchen with nobody near it.

And when he had shut the front door behind all three of them and stood in his own hallway with the mugs still in the other room, he knew, the way you know things in a hallway at half past nine, that something had been in his front room that he had not organized, could not have organized, and had not asked for a room big enough to hold.

He put the floor at two

There is a sentence of His that gets quoted so often it has gone smooth, like a step worn down in the middle, and it is worth putting your foot on it properly.

The written word puts Him in the midst of two or three, and the Holy Spirit has never once waited for a fourth.

For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am in their midst.Matthew 18, verse 20

Hear this in your own front room. You are not running something less than a church, and the written word is what settles it. Scripture puts Him in the midst of two or three gathered in His name, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has had you opening that room every Wednesday.

Two.

Not two as a sad minimum. Not two as a concession for people who could not manage better. He set the floor at two, deliberately, out loud, and He put no ceiling on it at all, and both halves of that are Him being generous rather than one of them being a criticism of the other.

Because look at what those same people did the moment they had the choice. They were in the temple, the largest and most magnificent building any of them had ever walked into, every single day. And they broke bread from house to house, in front rooms, on the same day, with the same joy. Nobody in Acts is recorded as thinking of those two things as rivals. It never occurs to them. It is one church doing both, and it would have baffled them to be asked which one counted.

So the big church on the ring road is a church, and a good one, and four hundred people singing the same line at the same time is one of the best sounds available to a human being on this earth. The man in the high visibility jacket in the rain is doing the Lord's work. Whoever unlocks that building at seven in the morning is doing the Lord's work. None of that is being taken away from anybody here, and if that is where you are, you are not in the wrong room either.

Nothing written anywhere sets a minimum on a room, and the Spirit of God has been at work in yours every week.

It is only that He said two.

And you have started saying only.

The written word names the gathering by His name and not by its size, and the Holy Spirit has met you there.

Listen to yourself say the number this week and you will hear it. There's only four of us. It's only a small thing. Nobody taught you that word. Nobody in your front room said it to you. It arrived on its own, the way that word does, and it has been sitting in front of your number for about two years now, and it is doing quiet damage to a thing He is plainly in the middle of.

He is in the middle of it. That is not encouragement, it is a location. He said where two or three are gathered in His name, and He said there I am, present tense, no conditions about the size of the room, the quality of the teaching, the state of the carpet or whether anybody has a title.

And He is in the middle of it for you, personally, on a Wednesday, with the piano stool and the biscuits still in the packet.

Hear this too, and let it land on the four chairs. You are not required to apologize for a number, and Scripture is what says so. What is written names two or three and puts His presence in the middle of them, and the Spirit of God has never once set a minimum on a room.