Nineteen In the Pews

Junie counts during the offering. She has done it for six years and she does not know how to stop.

She counts from the third pew on the left, working forward and then back, and she does not move her lips because that would be obvious. Homecoming Sunday, doors propped, the good hymnals out of the closet, the ones with the padded covers.

Nineteen.

The room seats two hundred and eleven. She knows the number because it is painted inside the door of the fuse box, and she knows why the room is not full, and so does everybody else on the ridge. The mine. Then the school consolidating down the valley. Then two young pastors in six years, both of whom left for reasons that were partly the town's fault and partly nobody's. And one other thing, which happened a long time ago in that congregation and hurt people who are still living, and which I am not going to pull out and hold up here, because it is not mine and because the people it happened to did not ask me to.

So: nineteen. Down from twenty-three at Easter. Junie has stopped telling anyone the number and she has not stopped counting it.

Last hymn. Miss Opal, who is ninety-one and sits at the aisle end of the second pew, put her hand out for Junie's arm, which she does now for standing.

Junie got her up. Opal got her balance, took hold of the pew in front, and looked around the room the way you look at a room you have known your whole life.

"Nineteen," she said.

Junie's whole face went hot, because she had never once said it out loud.

"When I come here," Opal said, "it was four. Four and a stove that would not draw."

And they sang the last verse standing, nineteen of them, in a room built for two hundred and eleven, and the sound went up into all that empty roof, and there was room for it.

If you are keeping a count of your own, you know exactly what Junie was doing with hers: not measuring a room, but reading a verdict off it. You are inside a company that Christ has not left, and He is not leaving it now. Scripture says God walks with His people and does not let go of them, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that hold in a building where the numbers have gone the wrong way for six straight years.

He said it on the worst day they had

The plain shape first, because on this site the subject is a company and never a private feeling.

The bride in Scripture is the church. A whole people, out of every century and every hollow and every language, spoken of as one because Christ committed Himself to the whole of it. That is why a half-empty building on a ridge is not the unit of measurement. The unit is a people spanning two thousand years, and a church of nineteen is inside it. You are part of something Christ bound Himself to, and that binding is already done and not up for review. The word says so and it is the Holy Spirit who holds that scattered people together as one body rather than as a set of struggling rooms.

Now hear where the anchor for this comes from, because the setting is the point.

Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid and do not tremble before them, for the Lord your God is the one walking with you. He does not let go of you and does not forsake you.Deuteronomy 31:6

That is said on the day Moses tells a whole nation he is not going over with them. Their leader is being taken away, they are looking at a river and a country full of trouble, and this is the sentence they are handed. Not a projection. Not an incentive. A statement about who is walking.

And it is plural. Every one of those words is spoken to all of them together, which is exactly how the promise has to be read: not a private assurance to one confident individual, but a fact about the God who goes with a people. You are being walked with right now, in a room of nineteen, and it is already settled. That is written in Deuteronomy and repeated in Hebrews, and the same Spirit who kept that word alive for three thousand years is the one making it land on a woman counting from the third pew.

The honest part, and what it does not prove

I am not going to pretend the count means nothing, because it means something to the people who love that room, and telling them otherwise would be a lie in a kind voice.

Some of the emptying is ordinary. A mine closes, a school consolidates, the young move where the work is, and none of that is a spiritual event. Some of it is not ordinary. Churches do harm. Yours may have. People have been hurt by congregations and by leaders and by silences that lasted decades, and I am not going to excuse a single hour of it or explain it into something better than it was. It was what it was.

But here is what it does not prove, and this is the whole difference. You are looking at a record of what people did, and none of it is a report on whether Christ has stayed. Scripture puts the keeping of the covenant on His side of the page and says He does not let go, and it is the Holy Spirit given as the guarantee, which means the evidence for His faithfulness was never going to be found in the attendance figures.

Read the promise again and notice who the verbs belong to. He walks. He does not let go. He does not forsake. There is no clause in that sentence about the size of the crowd, the competence of the leadership, or how well the people behaved in the century just past. If there had been, Israel would have lost the promise before they got over the river.

You have a covenant that is kept from His side, and it holds on the days the people in it fail. That is written plainly and the Holy Spirit is the one who applies it, and it is the only reason any church anywhere is still standing.