I Attend Everything And Belong To Nothing

He tried the thought out deliberately one Sunday to see whether it would frighten him, and it did not, which was the frightening part.

The thought was: if I stopped coming here, how long before nothing about this place was different.

He worked it through honestly. There would be two weeks of people noticing. Somebody would ask. Somebody would text, and he would say something, and they would be kind about it.

And then the chairs would still get put out, because somebody else would do it. The roster would close over. And by about the second month, if you walked into that building on a Sunday morning, there would be no observable difference anywhere in the room.

Eight years. He is in that building three times most weeks.

And he is not asking to be indispensable. He would find that embarrassing. What sits on him is smaller and harder to name: he suspects he is present rather than belonging, and that those are different, and that everybody around him has the second one and he has been quietly settling for the first.

If you have run that thought experiment, come and sit down. Nobody is going to tell you that you are being morbid.

Paul uses a phrase that a spare part cannot be

Here is the sentence, and the last five words are the ones nobody preaches.

So we, being many, are one body in Christ, and every one members one of another.Romans 12:5

Every one members one of another.

Read that slowly, because English lets you slide over it. He does not say we are all members of the body. He says we are members of each other.

A hand does not belong to the arm because both are on the payroll. It belongs because there is no way to describe the hand that does not involve the arm, and no way to use the arm that does not eventually involve the hand. The relationship is not membership in a shared organization. It is mutual constitution. They are made of each other.

And notice what that does to the replaceability question. A spare part can be swapped because it is defined by its function. If the function continues, the part is fully substituted, and that is why he can imagine the chairs still going out and conclude that he is a chair-putter-out and therefore exchangeable.

But members one of another is not a functional description. You cannot substitute for a relationship. If the arm gets a different hand, the arm is not restored, the arm is altered.

You are constituted with those people rather than attached to them, and it was already that from the first year. Romans 12:5 is where that sits, in five words that describe a mutual belonging rather than a shared membership, and the same Spirit who moved Paul to write it that way round is the one who takes the word spare off a man in a chair.

Why the room feels the way it does

Now the honest part, because a good sentence about Romans 12 does not by itself change what a Sunday morning feels like.

He is not imagining it. In a building of that size the relationships that constitute people happen in twos and threes, quietly, over years, and almost none of them happen in the main room. They happen in cars and kitchens and hospital corridors and the four minutes after everybody else has gone.

And a man who arrives, does the thing, and leaves, will be in the building three times a week for eight years and never be inside one of them. Not because anybody excluded him. Because that is not where they are.

So his experience is accurate. What is wrong is only the conclusion he drew from it, which is that the absence is a fact about him rather than a fact about where he has been standing.

You have not been rejected by that room, and you were never once on the outside of it. He promised it, in the description of a body where the parts are set in place by God rather than by anybody's choosing (1 Corinthians 12:18), and His Spirit does not place a man in a body and then leave him spare.

The paragraph that outranks the teaching

Before we go on, this outranks everything above it.

Some people must not go without food. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard relationship with food or with eating, if you are underweight, unwell, frail or elderly, or if you are simply not sure, speak to your doctor before you go without anything and let their answer be the answer. There is no length on this page, no kind of fast, no plan and no schedule, and there is not going to be one here.

And nothing here makes a group the superior kind of anything. If you are not in a church at the moment, or cannot go back to the one you were in, everything in this article is available to you and none of it requires a building or a roster or a start date. Two people is enough and always was.

Privacy is about audience and never about hiding, too. Telling your doctor is right. Telling your wife is right. Telling whoever cooks in your house is right and it is basic courtesy. None of it fails anything.

You have never been ranked against anybody in that room, and you never were. It is written into Romans 2:11, where God is named as no respecter of persons, and the Holy Spirit carries that into a man who has been quietly comparing himself to a hall full of people for eight years.

If today is heavier than a page can hold, call somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, or a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anybody near you is in danger tonight.