They Broke Bread House To House

He counted it out in the car after the last evening of the last thing and the number surprised him.

Nineteen years at that church. In nineteen years he has done: two marriage courses, one of them as a helper. Four rounds of the small group study, whichever one was running. The men's breakfast, monthly, for six years until it stopped. Two weekends away. The prayer meeting, at various points, in various formats. And every single corporate thing the church has ever announced, including this one, which finished on Tuesday.

And in nineteen years he has eaten a meal in exactly two people's houses, and one of those was a funeral.

He is not a stranger there. People know him. He would be missed if he stopped coming and somebody would ring. He is on a list somewhere and the list is accurate.

But he sat in the car on Tuesday and understood that he has been attending an institution for nineteen years and could not tell you what is in the front room of anybody who runs it.

If you have got a number like that, come and sit down. Nobody here is going to suggest another program.

Luke describes two things and only one of them can be organized

Here is the description everybody quotes when they want to say something about the early church, and the interesting thing about it is that it has two halves.

And they, continuing daily with one accord in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, did eat their meat with gladness and singleness of heart.Acts 2:46

Continuing daily with one accord in the temple. That is the organized half. Somewhere with a schedule, a shape, and people in charge of it. He has done that half for nineteen years and done it well.

And breaking bread from house to house. That is the other one, and read where it happens. Not in the temple. In houses. Somebody's actual kitchen, with their own food, and their own children coming in and out.

Luke puts them in one sentence because they were one life. Neither is the superior kind and nothing here says the temple half is a lesser thing, because it plainly was not for them.

But notice which one his church can schedule. It can announce the first, and it does, faithfully, and it fills those rooms. It cannot announce the second, because the second is not an event. Nobody can put house to house in a calendar and nobody has ever managed it in two thousand years of trying.

You have done one half faithfully for nineteen years, and it was already faithfulness and not a mistake. Acts 2:46 is where that sits, in a sentence that keeps both halves without ranking them, and the same Spirit who moved Luke to record them together is the one who lets a man in a car see which one he has been missing.

Nobody withheld it from him

Let me deal with the natural next move, because a man who has just done that arithmetic will start looking for who is to blame and there is nobody.

The church did not withhold it. There is no leader anywhere who decided that his kitchen should be closed to this man for nineteen years. Everybody in that building would say yes if he asked, most of them warmly, several of them immediately.

And he did not fail either. He showed up to everything. In a great many churches that is the entire definition of a committed member and nobody would ever have raised it with him.

What happened is simply that the organized half is announced and the other half is not, and a person who does everything that is announced will do one and not the other for as long as he lives. He was following the only instructions available.

That is worth knowing, because the alternative is a man of fifty-two deciding at eight at night in a car that he has been doing it wrong since the nineties, and that is not true and would not help him.

You have not been failing at church, and it was never in the instructions you were given. He promised it, in the words about being fellow citizens and members of the household of God, which is a domestic image rather than an institutional one (Ephesians 2:19), and His Spirit does not measure a man by the events he attended.

The paragraph that outranks the teaching

Before anything else, 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 on this page makes the corporate version the superior kind. If you are outside every group that exists, in a town with nothing running, or in a church you cannot go back to, everything in this article is available to you and none of it needs a building. One table and one other person is the whole of it.

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 been fully inside this, and you were never at the edge of it because of what your body allows. Scripture settled that long before you got here (2 Corinthians 8:12), and the Spirit of God is not distributed by attendance.

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.