Both Halves Still On One Street

There are two church buildings on Delaney Street, four hundred yards apart. The brick one with the bell housing has been there since 1911. The metal sided one with the good parking lot went up in 1979, fast, over one winter, by men who were angry and worked well angry.

Carol was ten when it happened. Her parents went up the street. Her grandmother stayed put in the brick one and made no comment about it for the rest of her life, which was thirty one more years.

Nobody living can tell you cleanly what the split was about. It started as a building fund and became about a man's honor and then became about who had said what in a meeting, and by the time it finished, the thing it was about had evaporated and left only the shape of itself behind, which is what those things do.

Today is Ruth Bellamy's funeral, and Ruth is the only reason both halves are in the same room.

Ruth taught the primary class before 1978 and she taught it after, and she is the only person in forty seven years who kept showing up at both buildings, for weddings, for hospital visits, for a casserole, without ever once explaining herself or asking anybody else to explain either. She was ninety four. She would not have called it a ministry. She would have called it knowing people.

So the brick church is full. And the seating has arranged itself without a single word being said about it, because forty seven years of habit does not need instructions: the up the street people are on the left, the stayed put people are on the right, and Carol, who married a man from the left and buried a mother from the right, is sitting in the fourth row on the aisle, which is where she has sat at every wedding and every funeral of her adult life.

Then the pianist starts, and everybody stands, and both halves of that street sing the same hymn.

They know it in the same key. They know the same alto line, because it was taught to all of them by the same woman in the same primary class. Nobody rehearsed this. Nobody agreed to it. The sound goes up out of that room in one piece, and it is the first thing either building has done together since before Carol could ride a bike, and it happens by accident, over a coffin, in four part harmony.

Carol puts her hand over her mouth.

You know the sound of a room that got broken. Maybe you were ten too. Maybe you were the adult in the meeting. And somewhere in the years since, without ever putting it in words, you did the arithmetic and came out the other side certain of one thing: that whatever else God is doing in the world, He quietly took His hand off that street.

You are held by a keeping that never once depended on how well the church behaved. Scripture says Christ builds and the gates of hell do not overpower what He builds, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been in that brick building and that metal one the whole time, in the years nobody was speaking.

Whose building project it actually is

Read the sentence Jesus says about this and notice who the builder is, because everything turns on it.

And I also say to you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not overpower it.Matthew 16:18

You are part of something He calls His own and says He is building, and that has not been handed over to a committee. That is written in Matthew 16:18, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps it standing, which means the load was never on the men in that meeting in 1978 and it is not on you now.

He says my church. Not your church, not the one you built and therefore have to hold up. And the church in that sentence is a people, one people, a company. It is not a building and it is not a denomination and it is certainly not a private arrangement between Christ and one individual. He is talking about a body of human beings, and He is saying He is the one constructing it.

That is the frame, and it changes what a split is. A split is a real wound in a real people and I am not going to make it small. But it is not the collapse of God's project, because God's project was never being held up by the people who fell out. If it had been, it would have gone down in the first century, and I want to show you why I can say that.

You are inside a people He owns, and the wound in it was never the end of it. Scripture has Him saying my church, in the possessive, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a body alive through a season its own members could not carry.

He has never once left a church that failed

Here is the honest part, and it is honest in both directions.

The letters in the New Testament are not written to churches that were doing well. Read who they are addressed to. A congregation in Corinth suing each other in public and making a mess of the one meal that was supposed to hold them together. Churches in Galatia that had gone off the rails within a few years. Seven congregations in Revelation, most of them told plainly what was wrong with them, including one told it was cold and one told it was lukewarm and one told it had a name for being alive and was not.

And to every single one of them, He is still writing. That is the thing. The letters exist because He did not withdraw. Correction is what you send to a house you are still living in.

You have not been left, and neither has the company you are part of, however badly it has gone. The word says He gave Himself for the church and He is the one building it, and the Holy Spirit did not vacate the room in 1978 and has not vacated it since.

Two things I am not going to do here. I am not going to excuse what was done. If somebody was harmed on your street, the harm was real, and nothing about Christ's faithfulness makes it smaller or asks you to call it fine. And I am not going to prosecute anybody either, not the ones up the street and not the ones who stayed. I do not know what happened in that meeting. Neither of those is the subject.

You are standing in a company Christ has kept, and the keeping is His and not a report card on the congregation. Scripture puts the building and the holding on His side of the sentence, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has kept a hymn tune alive in two buildings that were not speaking, which is the sort of thing He does while nobody is watching.