Forty Years In One Congregation

He has been in that building since he was nineteen and he could tell you where every draught comes from.

He has done the roof appeal twice. He carried his father out of that door and his daughter in through it, and he has sat, for something like thirty of those forty years, in the fourth row on the left with his back to a radiator that has never once worked properly.

And in April something happened to him in that seat.

Not to the church. To him, personally, on an ordinary Sunday with about forty people in, during the part of the service that nobody would call the important part. And he has spent the months since in an odd position for a man of his standing there: he is the person other people come to with questions about that building, and he has one he cannot ask anybody.

He is not going anywhere. Let us be clear about that from the start, because a man who has given a place forty years is not casting about. The trouble is that a thing has arrived in a room that has no shelf for it, and the man it arrived in is one of the pillars of the room.

If you have given a place decades and been met in it strangely, lean on this tailgate a while. Nothing about your congregation is going to be run down here.

Long service is not a reason He would not

Let us take the quiet objection first, because it has been sitting there since April and it is the one he would be most embarrassed to say out loud.

It runs like this: things like that happen to newcomers and to young people and to somebody at a conference. Not to a man who has been in the same row since the Callaghan government and has heard every sermon that building has produced twice.

Nothing in Scripture supports that. God moves on people who have been in place a long time constantly, and He does it without any regard for how well they know the plumbing.

You are not too long established to be met. Forty years of showing up has never once been the reason God would pass a man over. I am not saying that to flatter anybody. The written word says they that wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength (Isaiah 40:31), where waiting is the long staying and the renewing comes to the ones who did it, and the Holy Spirit is what makes that hold in a fourth row with a cold radiator.

The old man who wanted it for everybody

Here is what steadied me on this, and it is not a comment on your minister.

There is a moment where Moses is told that two men are prophesying in the camp who were not at the tent with the others, and the young man reporting it wants them stopped.

And Moses said unto him, Enviest thou for my sake? would God that all the LORD'S people were prophets, and that the LORD would put his spirit upon them!Numbers 11:29

Read what the old leader says. Not, that is irregular. Not, they were not at the meeting. He says he wishes it on everybody, and the sentence has an ache in it, and it comes from a man who had been leading that people a very long time and had seen more than most.

The instinct to tidy a thing away came from the young man. The wanting it for everybody came from the one who had been there longest.

You are standing where he stood, and Scripture puts that generosity in the mouth of the man with the most years in. That is written down exactly that way, and the Holy Spirit brings it to bear on a man who has been in the fourth row for thirty years.

Nothing here is telling you to move

Something must be said very plainly, because a piece like this often ends with a door being pointed at.

This page has no idea what your church is like and no business advising you about it. It will not tell you to go and it will not tell you to stay, and any sentence in either direction from somebody who has never met you would be worth nothing.

What is being said is one claim and it is small.

You can be renewed in the room you are already in, and forty years of being one of its pillars does not put you outside what God is doing in it. Scripture says he giveth power to the faint; and to them that have no might he increaseth strength (Isaiah 40:29), which names tiredness rather than novelty as the qualification, and it is the Holy Spirit, and not a category, who makes that live in a man in April.

And if this has taken more out of a man than anybody in that yard knows, if sleep has gone, if the evenings have started to frighten, talk to somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if there is danger to anybody tonight. That is not going around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people.