A People For His Name

The training is in the fellowship hall of the church with the good parking lot, which is the only reason it is at that church, and everybody knows it.

Four congregations. Long tables pushed into a horseshoe, coffee urns at both ends, a stack of folding chairs against the wall that somebody keeps having to fetch from because more people came than said they would. On the tables, printed handouts with a diagram of a sanctuary and arrows on it. The man running the training is a retired mail carrier named Vernon who has been an usher for thirty-eight years and has strong feelings about where people put the offering baskets.

Ivy is near the end of the horseshoe with a lanyard on and her handout already folded into a small tight square, because she folds things when she is unsure.

She almost did not come. She has a history in rooms. She laughs too loud and she asks the question everybody else was politely not asking and she cries at things that other people apparently manage to get through, and she has been told about all of it. Nine years old, the first time. You're a lot, Ivy. Said kindly, some of it. Said other ways too. It goes in either way.

So she has spent the morning at the far end of the horseshoe running the calculation she always runs, which is how much of herself to let out of the bag in a room this size, and the answer she has arrived at is: not much, and definitely not the laugh.

Then it is a quarter to twelve and Vernon says they are ordering lunch, and he needs a number.

And he does the thing. Everybody has seen somebody do it. He starts at the door end with a pen in the air, tapping heads down the row, mouth moving, and he loses count around the coffee urn and starts again, and the room enjoys that enormously, and the second time he gets to the end and says, "Forty-one."

Then he writes 41 on the top of his handout and goes to phone it in.

Ivy sits very still.

Because she was in that. She was tapped and counted and nobody looked at her face while they did it. Thirty-eight years of ushering, a pen in the air, and she went into the number the same as the man beside her, and there was no moment, no pause, no small assessment of whether she was going to be a lot today.

She is forty-six years old and she has to put her hand flat on the table, because she cannot remember the last time she was included in something without first being weighed.

Maybe you know that pause. The half-second where somebody's eyes flick over you before you get let into the count, and you have learned to see it coming and you have learned to make it easier for them. And here is what is true while you sit with that: you are counted into a company that was taken out for God's own name, and you are in it right now without a single assessment of you having been made. That is Scripture and not encouragement, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a sentence like that off a page and puts it somewhere it can be felt.

What James actually said in that room

There was a council in Jerusalem, and it was an argument, and the argument was about who was in.

You can feel the temperature of it in Acts 15. People standing up. People disputing. And then James gets up to summarize what has actually been happening, and the sentence he uses to describe the whole move of God is the sentence I want you to have.

Simeon has related how God first visited the Gentiles, to take from them a people for his name.Acts 15:14

Not to pick out some promising individuals. Not to identify who was worth including. To take out a people. One company, gathered, and the word that settles the whole council is a plural word.

That is what the church is, and that is what this whole site is about. The bride in Scripture is the church, corporately, a people across every century and every language, and never one person's private arrangement with Christ. It is a covenant word about a crowd. You are inside that crowd, and your place in it is a fact about the company rather than a verdict about you. The word says God took out a people for His name, and the Holy Spirit is the one who put you into that people, which is why nobody in it can point to the moment they qualified.

And notice whose name is on it. A people for his name. Not for their quality. Not for their temperament. The name on the company is His, which means the standard the company is held to is His reputation and not yours, and that changes what your presence in it can possibly depend on.

Too much for the room, and counted anyway

Now let me take the actual wound, because I am not going to leave it in the corner.

The thing you have been told, in whatever form you got it, is that there is a correct amount of a person and you are over it. Too loud. Too intense. Too many questions. Too much feeling arriving too fast, at the wrong moment, in front of people.

Here is what I am not going to say to you. I am not going to say that God looked at you specially and decided you were wonderful and picked you out of a lineup, because that is the same machinery in a nicer coat: you would still be standing there being assessed, and next week you would be waiting for the reassessment. That is not how any of this works.

What Scripture says is bigger and colder and much kinder than that. God took out a people for His name. The company exists because of who He is. You are in that company on the strength of His name and not on the strength of your volume. It is written in Acts 15 that the people were taken for His name, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the taking, which means the threshold you have been failing your whole life was never the threshold at the door.

So the laugh is not a liability at the count. Neither is it a qualification. It is just yours. And a company gathered around His name has room for a woman who feels things fast, and always did, in every century it has existed, in every language it has prayed in.

You have never once been under review for your place in this. The written word says a people was taken out for His name, and the same Spirit who moved James to say it is at work in you now, and review is simply not the relationship.