We Have Not Given It A Name

Above a barber's, in a flat with a sash window that only opens six inches, on a Thursday, four of them.

It started because two of them could not get to anything on a Sunday because of shifts, and one of them had a flat, and the fourth came because somebody mentioned it on a landing.

Two years next month.

They eat first, usually something out of one pan, and then they read a bit and talk and pray and it runs late and somebody always has to leave in the middle because of the last bus.

He is asked about it maybe once every six weeks, by somebody at work or somebody's mum, and it goes the same way every time.

They say: what is it, like a Bible study?

And he says: sort of. And then he says: it is not really a thing.

He has said it is not really a thing about nine times now, about something that has met more consistently over two years than anything else in his life, and he heard it come out of his own mouth in a kitchen at work in the spring and had to go and stand outside for a minute.

Here is the shape of what he is actually waiting for, and he has never written it down.

He is waiting for somebody to come and make it official. Somebody older, with standing, who would look at it and say yes, that is a proper thing, and hand it a name. And until that happens it is four lads in a flat and he will keep saying sort of.

Nobody is coming. He has half known that for about a year.

The name arrived from outside, afterwards, about something already happening

Sit down on the boards a minute, because there is one line in Acts about the most famous name in the world, and where it comes from is not what anybody assumes.

Antioch. Some believers had scattered there after trouble and had started talking to people nobody had thought to talk to. Barnabas got sent to look at it. He fetched Saul. They spent a year with the church there.

And then this.

And it came to pass, that a whole year they assembled themselves with the church, and taught much people. And the disciples were called Christians first in Antioch.Acts 11:26

Were called. Not called themselves.

The name came from outside. It came from the town, about people who had already been meeting for a year, and there is no account anywhere of anybody in that room convening a meeting to decide what to be called or waiting to be recognized before they got on with it.

They assembled. They taught. For a year. Then a word arrived about them, from other people, afterwards.

Hear this on the floor of that flat. You are not waiting for the thing that makes it real, and the written word is what settles it. Scripture has the church at Antioch operating for a full year before anybody had a word for what they were, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been in a room above a barber's for two years on a Thursday.

Now let me name what you are waiting for, because you half know it and you have never written it down.

Permission.

Not a name, really. A name is a symptom. You are waiting for somebody with standing to arrive and confer legitimacy on four people who have been faithfully doing the thing for a hundred Thursdays, and nothing written in Scripture makes that a requirement, and the Holy Spirit has not been waiting for it.

And here is the difficulty with waiting for that, and it is not that nobody will come. Somebody might. It is that while you are waiting for it, you are the one saying it is not really a thing, and you are saying it to people who asked because they were interested.

Hear this too, and let it land where the kitchen at work is still sitting. You are not inventing something and hoping it counts, and Scripture is what says so. What is written has a church running a year before it had a name, and the Spirit of God has never once withheld His presence from a room pending recognition by anybody at all.

And let me be careful, because this site has a rule about it. None of this is a word against the building on the corner or the man who leads it or the structure he works inside. Those are not obstacles and they are not the opposite of what happens above the barber's, and if one of you walked into that building on Sunday you would find the same Lord in it. The only thing being taken off you is a queue you joined for a stamp that Antioch never had.