The Church Is A Furniture Store Now

He was not even going that way. There was a diversion on the coast road and the satellite navigation took him inland through a town he had not driven through in twenty-two years, and then it took him down that street, and he was doing about fifteen miles an hour behind a bin truck when he looked left.

Sofas.

Not a sign about sofas. Sofas, actual sofas, four of them, in the window that used to be the window behind where the tank was, arranged at those angles that furniture shops arrange things at. There was a banner across the front in a font that has never once been used for anything true.

He pulled in about eighty yards further on and sat there for a while with the engine running.

That building had ninety people in it on a good Sunday. It had a hall at the back with a serving hatch and a photograph of a mission trip to Malawi in a frame that was slightly too big for it. It had a man called Brother Dennis who ran everything and made every decision and was, everybody agreed later, the reason it worked and also the reason it did not survive him.

He went into the water in that building when he was nineteen.

He remembers it well, which he has been grateful for, given what he has heard from other people. He remembers what was said. He remembers his own mother crying in the second row and being embarrassed about it and also glad. He remembers a woman called Pauline who made an enormous fuss of him afterwards and gave him a card with a verse on it that he still has in a book somewhere.

Pauline is dead. Brother Dennis is dead. The congregation went four ways when it closed: some to the big place out by the retail park, some to a house group that lasted two years, some nowhere at all. He has not spoken to anybody from that building in eleven years, and he moved counties twice, and there is no reunion and no register and no successor congregation that could claim it.

He is forty-one. He sat in that lay-by for about ten minutes.

And what came up in him was not sadness exactly. It was something more disorienting: the sense that the thing that happened to him at nineteen had been held somewhere, and that the somewhere had been sold, and that nobody now living had it.

Where it was actually kept

I want to start with the disorientation, because I think you have been slightly ashamed of how much it got to you.

You are a grown man who pulled into a lay-by over a furniture shop. And you have probably told yourself since that it was sentiment, or nostalgia, or being forty-one, and it was none of those. It was something accurate.

You had, without ever deciding to, stored a thing about yourself in a building. And then you drove past and the building was full of sofas, and the honest, disoriented question came up: where is it now?

Here is the answer, and it is not a consolation, it is a location.

Who hath also sealed us, and given the earnest of the Spirit in our hearts.2 Corinthians 1:22

In our hearts. That is the address. God did two things according to that verse, and both of them were done to a person rather than filed in a place. He sealed, which is what you do to something to mark that it is yours and that it has not been tampered with. And He gave the earnest, the deposit, the down payment, and He put it in the one location that cannot be sold when a congregation scatters.

You are sealed, and the deposit is in you, and that is not a comforting thought I am offering a man who saw sofas, it is the written word, and the Holy Spirit is the reason it is landing under your ribs rather than in your understanding.

Now let me say something about Brother Dennis and Pauline and the mission photograph in the too-big frame.

You are allowed to grieve that. It was a real community and it had real weaknesses and it did not survive one man, and all of that can be true at once. You are not being asked to pretend it was less than it was, and Scripture does not require it, and the Spirit who was in that hall behind the serving hatch is not embarrassed by the memory.

But the grief is a different thing from the disorientation, and it is worth keeping them apart, because only one of them is based on something that is not true.

The one that is not true goes: what happened to me at nineteen was kept in that building, and the building is gone, and so the thing is now unheld. And I want to put my hand on that one specifically.

You have never once been held by a building. The word says the seal was put on you and the deposit was put in you, and the Spirit of God has been in your chest through two county moves and eleven years of silence, and none of it was in the walls.

I want to say one more thing, about the eleven years.

You have not spoken to a single person from that congregation in eleven years, and I suspect there is a low hum of guilt about that which comes up whenever the place is mentioned. Let me take that off you as well. A church that scattered because a man died did not scatter because of you, and there is nothing owed. You are not the custodian of a congregation that ended. The written word says God sealed us and gave the earnest of His Spirit in our hearts, and a heart was never on the deeds.

And here is the last of it, and it is for the man in the lay-by with the engine running.

You were sealed at nineteen and you are sealed at forty-one, and the seal did not change hands when the deeds did, and Scripture is what settles that, and the Spirit inside you is God's own down payment on it. That building has a new use. What God did in you does not.