Asked In The Car Park, Never In The Room

Three of them asked him tonight on the way out to the cars.

Not in a queue. Separately, at intervals, in that way people have of catching somebody by a wing mirror with the engine already running. What do you think, honestly, between us.

And he told them. And they listened properly, and one of them stood there for a full four minutes with his keys in his hand, and it went in, and it will show up in something one of them says next month.

Not one of them has ever asked him inside.

He wants it said plainly that he is not angry with any of them. They are good men. There is no villain here and there is not going to be one, and if you told them what this article is about they would be genuinely upset, and two of them would fix it by Friday out of sheer decency.

It has simply never occurred to anybody.

Including him. That is the part he has only recently admitted.

Here is the thought that arrived last Tuesday, in his own car, with the heater going and everybody else gone.

The man they trust in a car park at half nine might be a man they could trust in a chair.

He does not know what to do with that. He is not going to campaign for it, and he would rather not be in a room out of anybody's embarrassment. And underneath it there is a quieter thing, which is that he has arranged nineteen years around the belief that his kind of usefulness happens outside, in the informal places, on the way to somewhere.

If people ask you what you think everywhere except where it is decided, come back in and have a cup. The urn is still on and the chairs are still out.

Where the early church went looking

There is a moment in Acts where a real problem needs real people, and the interesting part is the direction the apostles looked.

Wherefore, brethren, look ye out among you seven men of honest report, full of the Holy Ghost and wisdom, whom we may appoint over this business.Acts 6:3

Look ye out among you.

Not: we will select. Not: we have identified. They turn to the assembled ordinary people and tell them to look among themselves, because the men needed for this were already in the room, sitting there, with no office and no title and nothing to mark them out except honest report and the Spirit and wisdom.

Every one of those three is a thing a man's neighbors know about him. None of them appear on a list. You find out who has honest report by asking the people who have watched him for nineteen years, which is to say, by asking the sort of people who catch a man by his wing mirror.

You are the kind of person the apostles told a church to go looking for, and the looking was among the ordinary and not above them. Acts 6:3 has the qualification set as honest report and the Holy Spirit and wisdom rather than as position, and it is the same Spirit named inside the verse as part of the qualification, which means what those three men were doing in the car park tonight was the process working, in the wrong location.

Nineteen years of the wrong belief

Now the thing he admitted last Tuesday, because it is the load bearing one and it has been quietly running the whole arrangement.

The belief is: my kind of usefulness happens outside.

It is a humble sounding belief and it has cost nineteen years. It means that every time somebody seeks him out informally, the belief gets confirmed rather than questioned. The evidence that he has something worth hearing is read, every single time, as evidence that outside is where he belongs.

You have been reading the same evidence backwards for nineteen years, and it has never once meant what you took it to mean. 1 Corinthians 12:18 says God hath set the members every one of them in the body, as it hath pleased him, and the setting is done by God rather than arranged by anybody's sense of their own category, and it is the same Spirit named through that chapter as the one distributing, which means where you are placed was decided somewhere other than in your own estimate of yourself.

Nothing here is a campaign

Let us be clear about what is not being suggested, because a man in your position will be braced for it and the bracing will stop him hearing anything.

Nobody is telling you to go and make a case. There is no strategy here, no conversation to request, nothing to raise with anybody, and not one word against a single person in that building.

The people leading are not being criticized in this article and will not be.

You are not being handed a grievance, and the standing being described is not taken from anybody. Philippians 2:3 says let nothing be done through strife or vainglory, but in lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than themselves, and it is written to people about how they hold their own place rather than how they claim a better one, and it is the same Spirit who works that lowliness, which means what is on offer costs nobody else anything at all.