Eleven People and a Kettle

You set out twenty-four chairs for nine years and then one Sunday you set out fourteen, and nobody said anything, and that was the loudest thing that happened all year.

Eleven on a good week. Nine if the Prices are away. The urn takes eleven minutes to boil and you know that because you have stood next to it for nine years listening to it, and you have prayed some of your best prayers in that eleven minutes with your hand flat on the table.

They have all been kind. That is what makes it heavy. The area minister was kind. Your wife was kind, and she was careful about it, and she was right that you have not slept properly since February. Your closest friend in the ministry said the word merge and then said it again more gently, which was somehow worse.

Nobody has said you failed. Everyone has been very clear that nobody is saying that.

And you have stood at the urn since, turning over a question you cannot get a clean answer to, which is whether what you are doing is faithfulness or whether it is the other thing that looks exactly like it from the inside.

Eleven people. A kettle. Twenty-four chairs in a cupboard.

The verse was spoken to a man looking at a small thing

There is a line in Zechariah everybody knows and almost nobody places.

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

Zerubbabel is rebuilding a temple, and it is a small one. The people who remember the first one weep when they see the foundation, because the new thing is visibly less than the old thing and everybody in the crowd can see it.

Into that, God says: not by might. And a few verses later He asks who has despised the day of small things.

The verse is not a slogan about doing more with less. It is spoken directly into a project that looks embarrassing next to what it replaced. You are standing exactly where that word was aimed. I am not putting my own opinion over you here. Scripture says not by might nor by power but by My Spirit, Zechariah 4:6, and the Holy Spirit named there is the same one standing beside you at that urn on a Sunday morning.

They are not your opponents

Before anything else, put this down and leave it down: the people telling you to merge are not against you.

Your friend used the word twice because it cost him to use it once. Your wife has watched February from closer than anyone. The area minister has no reason to want your room closed except that he has seen men do what you are doing and has watched what it costs them.

We are not going to make them into enemies. There is a version of this piece that hands you a weapon, and it would be easier to write and it would poison the next ten years of your friendships. Scripture puts wisdom in a multitude of counselors, Proverbs 11:14, and the Holy Spirit is as likely to speak through your wife in February as through a verse at an urn.

What they can see is real. They can see the sleep, and they are right about it. You have not been asked to choose between hearing them and standing here. Scripture says faithful are the wounds of a friend, Proverbs 27:6, and the Holy Spirit does not use the counsel of people who love you as a test you have to pass by ignoring them.

The part where I would say stop

Let me be plain about this, because a page that only encourages is not honest.

If this room is costing your household what your household actually needs, change the shape of it. If the sleep since February has become something a doctor should hear about, tell one. If the eleven people are being held together mostly by your own exhaustion, then something has to give and it should not be you.

None of that is failure. A church that meets fortnightly is a church. A congregation that joins another and keeps its people fed has not been extinguished, it has been carried. Faithfulness is not measured in chairs, and a man who wrecks himself to keep a room open has not honored the eleven.

You are not required to prove anything by breaking. Scripture says the Lord will not break a bruised reed, Isaiah 42:3, and the Holy Spirit is not standing at the back of that hall on a Sunday with a clipboard, whatever February has been telling you.

The part where I stand with you

And here is the sentence I will not let stand.

Eleven is not viable is a true statement about a budget and a false statement about a work. Those are two different things and the language of the meeting quietly merged them.

Eleven people is not a small crowd. It is eleven people. It is the man who comes because it is the only room where nobody asks him how the business is going. It is the woman who has been coming since her husband died and who has never once stayed for tea and comes anyway. It is a teenager who sits at the back on his phone and who has now sat at the back on his phone for four years, which means something even if nobody can say what.

None of that is on a form. You are not standing on numbers and you never were. Scripture says where two or three are gathered together in My name, there am I in the midst of them, Matthew 18:20, and the Holy Spirit did not attach a quorum to that.