The Place You Say You Go To

Somebody at work asks what you are up to on Saturday, and you answer without thinking about it, which is the whole trouble.

"Oh, my church is doing a thing."

Then, because she seems genuinely interested, you explain it. And this is where it goes quietly sideways, though nobody in that kitchen notices and neither do you. You explain your own congregation the way a person explains their dentist. Where it is. What time it starts. That the parking is a nightmare but there is a side street if you know about it. That they do a lunch afterwards which is honestly very good. You give a friendly stranger the opening hours of a place you have been part of for six years.

Six years. Think about what that actually buys a person.

You know the door on the north side sticks in wet weather and has to be lifted slightly on the handle. You know the second radiator along never warms up until the middle of March, whatever anybody does to it. You know the good mugs live behind the tall ones on the top shelf, which is deliberate, because of the toddlers. You know that if forty people are coming you put out forty four chairs, and that at five past you will still be carrying two more in from the back.

You have been on the tea rota since February. Not this February. The one before.

And you still say the church I go to.

Not ours. Not our lot, the way people say it about a family, or a team, or a road they live on. You say the church I go to, in the same tone you would use for the gym I use, or the garage I take the car to. If somebody wrote down a whole week of your sentences you would hear it in every one: they do a carol thing at Christmas which is actually really good. They have got a new sound desk. They are doing something for the food bank in the autumn.

They.

You recommend your own congregation like a restaurant you have been to twice and thought was decent.

And nobody put you there. Let me say that early, because the mind goes looking for somebody to blame and in your case there is nobody at all. Not one person in that building has treated you like a visitor. Somebody saved you a chair the second week. Somebody wrote your name on the rota in pencil, and then, a while later, in pen. When you had the flu two winters ago, two people you had barely spoken to left soup on your step in a pan you still have not given back.

You know the sentence, because you said it this week.

Maybe not that exact one. Maybe yours is that six years in, nobody there knows the actual thing that is going on at home. Maybe yours is that you arrive at the last possible minute and leave in the first thirty seconds, and you have been calling that being busy since before the boiler was replaced. Whatever your version is, it is not that they kept you outside. It is that a small distance has been kept from your side, carefully, for reasons you have never quite said out loud. And the distance is so old now that it does not feel like a decision. It feels like a fact about you.

The word that gives it away

Let me put the plain thing down first.

There is nothing wrong with the word church, and this is not a lesson about pronouns. But the words a person reaches for when they are not thinking are an honest report of where they believe they live. For six years the report has come back the same. A place you go to. On the list, somewhere between the dentist and the garage.

Here is what was written to a congregation of people who had every reason to think of themselves as outsiders, and notice how legal it sounds.

Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellowcitizens with the saints, and of the household of God.Ephesians 2:19

Two pictures, one after the other, and both of them are paperwork.

A fellowcitizen is not a well treated guest. A guest can be very welcome and still carry no rights at all: he is fed, he is thanked, and when the votes are taken he stands at the side of the room with a plate. A citizen is on the roll. His name is in the register whether he is in a good mood about it or not, and nobody in the city has the standing to review it on a wet Tuesday.

Then the second word, which is warmer and stranger. Household. In that world a household was not a feeling about people you liked. It was who ate at the table, whose name covered you when there was trouble, who was responsible for the doctor and the debts and the burial. To be of the household of God is to be counted in that way, on the inside of the roof, by the One whose name covers it.

You are in the second picture, not the first. Scripture does not say you are a foreigner who is being treated kindly. It says no more strangers, no more foreigners, and then it gives you two words that come out of a courthouse and a kitchen, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a sentence with that much law in it and lands it in a person who still says the church I go to.

Notice who did the moving in that verse. Nobody was interviewed. Nobody sat a probation. The status changed because Christ made it change, and the letter reports it as finished business before it asks anybody to behave like it.

You were placed in that family, and nobody in it is on probation. The written word says He set the members in the body, every one of them, as it pleased Him, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps saying it to the part of a person that has been quietly waiting for a verdict since the second week.

Why they is the cheaper word

Now the harder half, and I am going to count it out, because it is a sum, and it has been paid every week for six years.

They is cheaper. That is why it survives.

If it is their church, then when the singing goes badly it is not your embarrassment. When somebody says a clumsy thing from the front, the complaint is a customer's complaint rather than a relative's, and a relative has to stay at the table and eat the rest of the meal. Their church means never being disappointed as a member of the family. It means being disappointed as a visitor instead, and a visitor's disappointment costs nothing at all, because a visitor can simply go somewhere else.

Ours is expensive. It makes their failures partly yours, and the awkward Sunday belongs to you as much as the good one.

And underneath the sum is the real line, the one nobody writes down. If you never call it yours, nobody can ever take it from you. A person who has said the church I go to for six years has arranged things so that no one in that building has the power to break her heart. That is not silliness. That is somebody protecting a room she loves from a version of herself she assumes it would eventually get tired of.

You have not been kept at the door by anybody in that hall, and you are not being asked to buy your way further in. His word puts stranger and household in one sentence purely to tell you which of the two you are, and the Holy Spirit is not in the business of reopening a question the cross closed.

You are not claiming more than you were given. The written word says you have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father, and the Holy Spirit does not teach the children of a house to talk about it like people passing through.