It Was Decided Before The Room

You knew at four minutes past.

That is when Gemma said, we thought the March date, and it was the we that did it. Not the March date. The we, said easily, in a room where there were eleven of us and the we plainly did not mean eleven.

And then, forty minutes later, at the end, after the whole thing had been laid out in a way that only makes sense if it is already built: what do people think.

What do people think.

You said the March date sounded good. Which it does. It is a perfectly reasonable date and you have no objection to it whatsoever, and that is the strangest part of this, because you are not upset about March.

You are upset about the forty minutes.

You have started noticing them everywhere now, and once you notice you cannot stop. The paperwork that has clearly been through two drafts before you saw draft one. The name of the person who is doing it, said in passing, before anybody was asked who should. The email that thanks the group for its input on a thing the group did not shape.

And here is what has been happening underneath, and it is why this matters more than a date in March.

You have started preparing less. You come to those meetings now with nothing ready, because getting ready is what it costs to be consulted afterwards, and you have quietly decided not to pay it any more.

That decision was not made in a meeting either. You made it on your own, in a car, and nobody knows.

Paul names the exact fracture

There is a sentence in the middle of the body passage that people read past, because it is short and it sits between two long ones, and it is the sentence that names precisely what has been happening to you.

That there should be no schism in the body; but that the members should have the same care one for another.1 Corinthians 12:25

Schism. That is a tearing word, and he is not using it about a split that has happened yet. He is using it about a design principle. God assembled the body a particular way, on purpose, and He did it so that this specific thing would not occur.

And look at what the schism is actually made of, in his description. Not doctrine. Not a quarrel. It is the parts of the body deciding that some of them are the ones that matter, and that decision being read by everybody, and everybody adjusting to it.

That is a room where the we in we thought means four people out of eleven.

So take this straight away. You are inside the we, and the written word says God tempered the body together specifically so that no member could be set outside it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who did that placing. Not a preference of yours. A structural decision made by God about His own house.

Nobody in that room is doing this on purpose

I need to say this clearly because the alternative is a bitterness that will cost you five years.

The four people who decided in advance are not conspiring. They are almost certainly not aware. Two of them work together and talk about it in a corridor on Wednesdays, and by the time Thursday comes it is already shaped, and there is nothing sinister in a corridor.

That is how it always happens. A body does not tear because somebody tore it. It tears because a few members found it easier to talk to each other than to the whole, and easier is a very strong force over a long enough period.

Which means the fix is not confrontation. If you go in and name it, you will be right, and it will cost you enormously, and you will spend the following year being the person who said that thing.

The fix is that you stop treating the room as though its behavior decides your standing.

You are a full member of that body, tempered into it by God Himself. That is written, and the Holy Spirit put you there, and eleven meetings where the decision arrived before you did have not moved one line of it.

The hall where nothing was pre-decided

In 1895 a man called Phineas Bresee opened a plain hall in Los Angeles and made a rule that outlived him by a century: not one seat in that room was for rent.

He was not fixing an atmosphere. He was removing a mechanism, and he understood that this is the only thing that actually works. You can preach equality into a room with bought rows for forty years and the rows will win, because the rows are there every week and the sermon is over by one.

Take the mechanism out and the room stops speaking. People come in, they sit down, nobody has to work out where they rank, and the whole enormous quiet expenditure of managing your own position simply ends.

You have been running that expenditure for about two years. It is why you are tired on Fridays.

His word says God tempered the body so there would be no schism in it, and the Holy Spirit distributes to every member as He wills. That is the mechanism God installed, and it does not have a corridor in it.