Nine Years of Blessing Them and the Room Is Emptier

You do not count. You gave that up in about year three because it was doing something to you on a Sunday afternoon.

You know anyway. Everybody knows. You can tell from the third row back whether it is a sixty morning or a forty morning without looking twice, and today was a forty morning, in a room that seats a hundred and eighty and used to hold about ninety when you came.

Nobody left angry. That is the strange, unarguable, un-fixable fact of it. There was no split. There was no scandal. Two families moved for work. Four of the old guard have died, and you took all four funerals, and you loved every one of them. The Hendersons moved to the church with the band and were honest with you about it, which you respected and which still cost you a fortnight.

And every single Sunday, for nine years, you have raised your hands at the end and spoken the same benediction over that room, out loud, and meant it every time.

Nine years. About four hundred and fifty Sundays, allowing for holidays.

You are locking up now and the heating is clicking off and the number is in your head anyway even though you do not count, and there is a question in you that you would not say to a soul in that building, and possibly not to your wife.

What has it done? Nine years of it. What has any of it actually done?

Somebody else was always going to do the growing

Sit in the back row a minute. I am not going to give you a strategy and I am not going to ask about your outreach.

Let me put the true thing down first, and Scripture holds me to it and the Spirit will not let me be careless with a man on a Sunday afternoon: you have not blessed them badly. There is no better benediction. Nothing in this article is going to hint that a different wording, or more conviction, or a bolder voice, or a more expectant heart would have filled that room. If somebody has implied that to you, they were guessing, and I am not going to guess at you after nine years.

Now come and look at the sentence Paul wrote to a church that was busy attributing results to people.

I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase. So then neither is he that planteth any thing, neither he that watereth; but God that giveth the increase.1 Corinthians 3:6-7

Three clauses and three different jobs, and Paul is scrupulous about who has which.

Planting: a man. Watering: a man. Increase: God, and he says it twice, in case a church full of people organizing themselves around personalities missed it the first time.

Then he goes further than most preachers on that text ever do. Neither is he that planteth any thing, neither he that watereth. Not a criticism of the planter. A statement about categories. The man doing the visible work is not the one producing the outcome, and Paul says that in a letter to people who were actively keeping score.

The increase was never in your job description, and you have not failed at a task God never handed you. That is not me softening a bad attendance figure. That is what is written, and what the verse assigns and to whom, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes something that old and lays it in an emptying room with the heating clicking off.

Here is what nobody explains to a man in a pulpit. When you speak that benediction over them, you are not producing anything in those forty people. You are agreeing out loud with what God has already said over them. Your mouth is a door. God is the one going through it, and He has never once been obliged to show you what happened on the other side of it before next Sunday.

A blessing is not an input, and an attendance figure is not its readout. Scripture says the secret things belong unto the LORD our God, but those things which are revealed belong unto us (Deuteronomy 29:29), which is God dividing it Himself: results are His side, speaking is yours, and the Spirit has never handed a pastor a meter.

The count you gave up and never actually put down

Now let me name something, and I want you to hear that I am not scolding you for it.

You stopped counting in year three. You did not stop measuring. The number simply moved from a notebook into the back of your head, where it is harder to see and impossible to close.

And the moment there is a number and there is a nine-year habit in the same room, a ratio forms without anybody deciding to make one: this much said, this much shown. And a ratio quietly turns a benediction into an instrument, which is the exact thing you have preached against from that pulpit, and you did not notice it happening to you because it happened in a sentence you never said out loud.

That is not faithlessness and I will not call it that. It is what a mind does with repetition and a visible metric sitting side by side. And what is written never once invited a man to compute it, and the Spirit is not standing at the back with the figures.

God has not been assessing nine years by the third row, and He has never once made a room count the verdict on a man's obedience. It is written that it is required in stewards that a man be found faithful (1 Corinthians 4:2), and Paul chose faithful and not fruitful deliberately, in the same letter, a few paragraphs later, and the same Spirit who breathed both lines is in this room with you now, which is why it reads as a job description and not as a consolation.

Hear what I am not doing. I am not telling you the church will grow if you keep going, and I am not telling you it will not. I have no authority to promise you an outcome and I would not trade you one for your faithfulness. I am also not telling you to stop thinking about how that congregation reaches its town; that is ordinary pastoral work and you should keep doing it.

What I can put in your hands is this: four hundred and fifty benedictions have not come back to God empty, and their worth was never resting on the count. God's word does not come back to Him void (Isaiah 55:11), and the Spirit is the one carrying it, and forty people going out of a door under a spoken word is not a smaller event than ninety.