Church in the Parking Lot

The locks were changed on a Tuesday afternoon. By Wednesday evening there were forty folding chairs in the parking lot, four rows of ten, facing the open tailgate of Brother Dell's truck.

Yvonne set them out herself. The asphalt was still handing back the heat of the day through the soles of her shoes. Somebody ran an extension cord from the barber shop next door because the barber waved them off and said take it, take it, quit asking me. The keyboard went on an upturned milk crate. A moth found the work lamp and settled in for the evening.

She had kept the attendance book for nine years, so she counted, because counting was what her hands did. Forty chairs. Thirty-one people, and that was counting the twins, asleep in a stroller, who did not know they were in church.

Nine empty chairs. That was the number she could not stop looking at.

She thought about the storefront on the corner with the good carpet they had saved two years to put down. She thought about the piano still sitting behind a door she no longer had a key to. She thought about how you tell a person where church is when church does not have a where. And somewhere between the third row and the fourth she had already decided what this was. This was the part at the end. This was what a thing looks like on its way to being finished, and she had been handed the job of setting out the chairs for it.

Then Brother Dell stood up. Eighty-one years old, hat in his hand, wearing the brown jacket he wore in July. And he said the sentence he had said every Wednesday night for nine years, in the same order, with the same pause in the middle of it.

"Well. The church is here."

And Yvonne, holding an attendance book with nine empty chairs written into it, heard the word church land on gravel and stay there.

Maybe you have been counting something too. Empty seats, or the years since the doors closed, or the names of people who used to be in the room and are not. And underneath the counting sits a quieter thought, which is that a thing God was still committed to would look sturdier than this. You are inside the church Jesus Christ bound Himself to, and you are inside it tonight, on whatever ground you happen to be standing on. That is not my opinion offered to cheer you up. That is what Scripture says God did, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes it a fact in your chest instead of a sentence on a page.

The promise was never made to a room

Long before there was a church building anywhere on this earth, God told a people what He intended to do about them. And what He said He would do was live with them. Not visit them. Not check on them. Live with them, the way a household lives together.

He said it, of all times, to a people standing in the wreckage of their own history. They had lost the building. They had lost the city. They had lost the land the building stood on. If anybody ever had grounds to assume that the arrangement went down with the real estate, it was the people God was speaking to when He said it.

Now let me put the next part in the plainest words I own, because this is the exact place where readers get turned around. When Scripture speaks of the church as a bride, it is speaking about a whole people at once. It is a corporate word, the way nation is a corporate word, or family, or body. It is not a private romance between Christ and one person's feelings. It has nothing to do with whether you are married and nothing to do with how tender you felt in worship last month. It means that Christ has publicly and permanently committed Himself to an entire company of people. And the reason that matters to you on a Wednesday night in a parking lot is that you are in the company.

You are counted inside a people God has bound Himself to keep, and He did the binding from His side. Ezekiel wrote it down while the rubble was still warm, and the same Holy Spirit who carried that word to an exiled people is carrying it to you now.

My tabernacle also shall be with them: yea, I will be their God, and they shall be my people.Ezekiel 37:27

Read the pronouns before you read anything else. Them. They. My people. There is not one singular in the sentence. God does not say I will be his God and he shall be my person. He describes a plural and then moves in with it.

You have a place inside that word "them," and it is already settled rather than pending. His word put you there, and His Spirit is the deposit on it, the down payment God makes on a promise He has no intention of breaking.

And notice the picture He picks for His own dwelling. A tabernacle is a tent. Of every structure available to Him, God chose the one that folds up and travels. He was telling His people something about Himself long before they had a building to lose: I go where you go, and My nearness is not nailed to a floor.

What a landlord can actually change

A landlord can change a lock. A city can condemn a roof. A lease runs out, a boiler dies, a congregation splits and half the chairs leave with it. All of that is real, and none of it is small, and I am not going to pretend a lost building does not grieve people who paid for the carpet.

But look carefully at what any of it actually touches. Every one of those things reaches the property. Not one of them reaches the covenant, because the covenant was never made with the property. It was made with a people, and it was signed in the blood of Jesus, and the signature is not on file at the county office.

You are held by an agreement no landlord is a party to, and nobody has the standing to cancel it. Scripture says He obtained the church with His own blood, and the Holy Spirit inside that church is God's own seal on it.