The Back Pew Where It Happened

The leaflet went damp in the corner because he was holding it too hard, and that is the detail he keeps coming back to, because it is so ordinary and it was so not an ordinary morning.

Back pew, left hand side, the seat he has sat in for eleven years and could find in the dark. Third hymn. He was not asking for anything. He has never asked for anything in the way people mean when they say that.

And something came, and he wept, quietly and without any warning, for about three minutes, in a building where he has never cried once in eleven years.

What has followed, over five weeks, is a strange piece of reasoning that he has not said out loud. It goes: things like that happen at other kinds of church. Therefore what happened to me belongs to a kind of church I do not attend. Therefore I have either had somebody else's experience by accident, or I am being moved on.

He has not looked anything up. He has simply been sitting with a conclusion that arrived unexamined and has been solidifying ever since.

If it happened in your own seat and you have been trying to work out whose it was, come and sit at the table. Nothing about your church is going to be run down here.

The address was chosen by somebody

Let us look at the reasoning, because it has one hidden premise and everything turns on it.

The premise is that a kind of experience belongs to a kind of building, the way a kind of music belongs to a kind of venue. Under that premise, an experience arriving in the wrong venue is either a mistake or an eviction notice.

But he did not choose the venue. He was sitting in his usual seat holding a leaflet, and whatever happened, happened to him there, and nobody consulted him about the location.

You did not receive this by accident. Nothing about where it happened has ever meant it belongs somewhere else. I am not saying it to keep a man in a pew. Scripture says while Peter yet spake these words, the Holy Ghost fell on all them which heard the word (Acts 10:44), which is an arrival in a house nobody had planned for, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that hold in a man five weeks on.

He arrives in rooms nobody had scheduled

Here is the part that turned this for me, and it takes nothing off any other congregation.

Read where that verse puts the arrival, because everybody present was surprised by the address.

While Peter yet spake these words, the Holy Ghost fell on all them which heard the word.Acts 10:44

A private house in Caesarea. Not a synagogue, not the temple, not the upper room, and not a place anybody in that account had marked down as the sort of venue where this occurs.

And the timing is not managed either. While Peter yet spake, which is to say mid sentence, before the person leading had finished, in a room where the people who most understood these things were the most astonished.

You were met at an address He chose, and Scripture records Him arriving where nobody had it scheduled. That is written into the verse itself, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries it to a man in a back pew.

Nothing here is against any other church

Something must be said plainly, or this becomes a page about the kind of church he imagines has these things all the time.

Those congregations are not wrong. What happens in them is real, the people in them are not putting on a display, and his own instinct that this is more familiar territory over there is probably accurate as a description of vocabulary.

And nothing here tells him to go or to stay. That is not a decision a page makes for a man about the building he has sat in for eleven years.

He did this to you here. You can be renewed in the room you are already in. Scripture says the manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man to profit withal (1 Corinthians 12:7), where the giving is to a person and no address is attached to it, and it is the Holy Spirit, and not a category of building, who chooses where He falls.

And if these five weeks have cost more than the friends at that table know, if sleep has gone, if Sunday has started to frighten you, please 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 a detour around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people.