The Vote To Close

The called meeting is on a Tuesday at seven, in the sanctuary, because the fellowship hall has a leak over the north end and nobody wants to explain that to anybody tonight.

Nineteen people, in the front four pews, in a room built for four hundred and twenty.

Gordon has been a trustee for twenty two years. He has the folder on his knees with the property survey and the two letters from the regional office and the printed motion, which is one paragraph long and took a lawyer four hours.

The ballots were cut with scissors from a sheet of paper, four to a page, so the edges are not straight. Somebody wrote YES and NO on each one with a felt tip and drew a little box beside each word. There is a shoebox on the communion table to put them in, which is the only thing about the whole evening that Gordon finds genuinely unbearable, and he could not tell you why.

He knows how he is voting. He has known since the spring.

What he has not said to anybody, not to his wife, not to the pastor they shared with two other congregations until March, is the older thing underneath it. It is not that he thinks the church has failed, although it has, in ways he could list. It is that somewhere around 2011, after the business with the youth director and the eighteen months of meetings and the forty families who left and never came back, Gordon quietly concluded that God had moved out of this building, and that everything since had been housekeeping.

He never said it because it is not the kind of thing a trustee says. He just started experiencing Sundays as maintenance.

So he marks his ballot. Folds it once. Walks it up and drops it in the shoebox and sits back down.

The treasurer takes the box to the side table under the window to count, and turns on the little lamp, and the room goes into that particular silence that only happens in a room with a high ceiling and not enough people in it.

And Marguerite, who is ninety one, and who has not heard an announcement clearly since the Bush administration, says out loud to nobody in particular, in a completely ordinary voice, the way a person remarks on the weather:

Well. He's still here, though.

Nobody answers her. Nobody needs to. She is not making an argument, she has no idea a vote is happening, and she says it the way you would say it is raining.

Gordon sits with his hands flat on his knees and does not turn around.

You are somewhere in that room.

Maybe you are the trustee, or maybe you are one of the forty families, or maybe you are somebody who simply drifted while nobody noticed either way. But you have made Gordon's calculation. You looked at what the church did, or what it failed to do, or how thin and tired and small it became, and you drew the only reasonable conclusion available to you: that God had already gone, and what was left was a building and some habits. You are held inside a covenant that has never once depended on the church behaving well, and it is holding at this hour. That is what Scripture says about it in the flattest possible terms, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps a people through a decade that no one would call a good one.

What a vote can and cannot reach

Let me put this site's whole subject in plain words first, because everything after it depends on the size of the thing we are talking about.

When Scripture calls anybody the bride, it means the church: a whole people, corporate and plural, a company and not a person. It is the same class of word as household, body, city, flock and nation. It has never described a private romance between Christ and one reader, and if that framing ever made you uneasy, hold on to the instinct. What follows is about what Christ has bound Himself to, and He bound Himself to a people.

That distinction is the entire content of tonight.

A vote can close a corporation. It can convey a property, discharge a mortgage, settle an account with a regional office, and decide who gets the communion silver. Those are all real and they all matter and I am not going to be sentimental about them, because a congregation is a real thing and losing one is a real grief and it should be grieved.

You are permitted to grieve this properly, and nothing in the word of God asks you to be brisk about it. Scripture says Jesus wept at a graveside where He already knew exactly what He was about to do, and it is the Holy Spirit who is named the Comforter, which is a title that presupposes something worth being comforted about.

But look at what the vote cannot touch.

For the LORD will not forsake his people for his great name's sake: because it hath pleased the LORD to make you his people.1 Samuel 12:22

Samuel says that to a nation that has just done something genuinely bad. They had rejected him, they had asked for a king in order to be like everybody else, and Samuel had just called for thunder in the middle of the wheat harvest so they would feel the weight of it. They are standing there frightened, and this is the sentence he hands them.

Read the reason clause. Not because you have improved. Not because it turned out to be a misunderstanding. For his great name's sake. The reason God does not leave His people is a reason located entirely in God.

You are inside a people God will not forsake, and the ground of that is His name and not your record. That is written in a chapter where the people have just failed badly, which is exactly why it is worth having, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an old sentence like that hold up a man in a pew with a folder on his knees.

The failure is real, and it is not the subject

Now I want to be careful, because there are two bad ways to handle this and I do not want either of them.

The first is to excuse it. Somebody could take a verse like that and use it to hurry past what actually happened: the eighteen months of meetings, the forty families, whatever your own version is, the thing that was done to you or the thing that was covered up or the person who should have been protected and was not. I will not do that. The failure was real. If it was harm, it was harm, and no verse in the Bible asks you to call it something softer.

The second bad way is to spend the whole article prosecuting it, which feels honest and leaves a person with nothing. I am not going to do that either.

Here is what Samuel does instead, and it is a third thing.

He tells them the truth about what they did, plainly, in the same conversation. He does not minimize it by one word. And then he says the thing that is true about God, and he puts them in that order: the failure named, and the faithfulness declared, and the second one does not cancel the first one, it outlasts it.

You are standing on a faithfulness that was never a response to the church's conduct, and it has not moved. His word says if we believe not, yet He abideth faithful, for He cannot deny Himself, which is about as strong a sentence as the New Testament ever makes, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps that from being a slogan in a person who has actually been hurt.

And notice the other thing hiding in Samuel's line: it hath pleased the LORD to make you his people. Pleased. He wanted this. That is not the language of a God who is tolerating an arrangement and looking for the exit.

You were wanted, and wanted is the word the verse actually uses, and it has never been withdrawn. His word says it pleased the Lord to make you His people, pleased being a word about desire rather than duty, and it is the Holy Spirit who was given as the seal on a company He wanted in the first place.