The Name We Cannot Build

I invited someone to services a few weeks back. They came. I honestly was not expecting it. They sat through everything: the singing, the teaching, the breaking of bread. They bowed their head during the prayer. They did not sing the songs. Polite about all of it. Seemingly engaged. After services ended they left. Promptly. They have not come back. I have not asked them why yet. Time, on their part, to process is more important than a hasty set of questions. Lord willing that time may come and maybe some of what is being written now will change in some material way. We’ve seen this time and time again. Someone comes to worship. They participate in some obvious way. We ask them the we questions. The ones where we would like to get to know them better. Sometimes there are connections. Sometimes people just never return.

When this occurs we go through this process of thinking what I think most of us do. I ran the inventory. Was it the singing, the plain slightly flat voices with no band behind them? Was it the three and one half part harmony a cappella? Was it the teaching, which stayed direct, avoided modern therapy language, and close to the text? Was it that we had nothing to hand them on the way in, no worship program, no spectacle of lights, nothing built to impress a person used to being entertained by everything else? I kept going down the list.

Here is what I skipped, at least at first. I didn’t ask whether the standard they were measuring us by was the right standard to begin with. We often have no awareness of where they come from spiritually. We can see interest, partially, but only what’s externally obvious. Those things are never good indicators of what’s really going on inside the person. And when they leave, with little to comment about, the not-knowing is what we are left with.

People just leaving, without commentary, is an old grief. John knew it. He wrote to a fellowship that had watched some of its own walk away:

“They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us. But they went out, that it might become plain that they all are not of us.” (1 John 2:19, ESV)

I have to be careful with what I’m saying here. John is describing people who had been counted among the believers and then abandoned the faith, and he says their leaving showed where their anchor had been the whole time. He is not naming a guest who slipped out a side door. The grief can feel identical. The care for the soul walking away also identical.

We should never give up on those who came in the moment, whatever brought them in. Even when the position of the heart becomes clear and we hear with our own ears, “This was not what I wanted or expected,” we keep the door open. I’ve seen people who give chase to this outcome by asking what could we have done to change their heart? Jesus did not chase the crowd that turned back. He asked the twelve, and let the others go. There is another chase still that can lead to doctrinal drift. We might try and accommodate to win the soul, but the outcome is often not a soul won if we must compromise what is commanded to reach that soul.

A crowd once heard the hardest words Jesus ever spoke. The response stings like this:

“After this many of his disciples turned back and no longer walked with him.” (John 6:66, ESV)

No longer walked with Him. These were not strangers. They had followed Him. They had eaten the bread He multiplied with His own hands. And when His word turned out to be harder than the experience they had come for, they turned around and went home. Jesus let them go. Then He asked the twelve whether they meant to leave too, and I have never gotten over Peter’s answer: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.” (John 6:68, ESV)

That is the part that should frighten us. The visitor with a different taste in how the New Testament defines worship music is of the same mind of people who stand in front of Christ Himself, hear His word, and walk the other way.

Let me take us somewhere older still. Before there was a church, before there was an Israel, a people gathered on a plain and said to one another,

“Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.” (Genesis 11:4, ESV)

Read that again. We learned the Babel story early. We colored the page of the tower. The people scattered. They wanted a name, and they meant to build it themselves. For their own glory. With their own bricks. To their own height. I am not pointing at anyone’s worship and calling it Babel. Wanting to be moved when we gather is a human thing, and a full room can be a good one when aligned with God’s authority. What is as old as that plain is the motivation underneath the building. It is the moment we start measuring the church by the name it can raise instead of the Lord it abides in. This impulse is, in our case, a human interest mostly.

The place I keep reaching to understand is that abiding means the shape Paul draws of Christ Himself. He was the one “who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.”(Philippians 2:6–7, ESV)

He veiled the open display of His splendor and went down.

“And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.” (Philippians 2:8, ESV)

All the way down. And only on the far side of all that descent, this: “Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name.” (Philippians 2:9, ESV)

Notice the difference between the Shinar plain and the cross. At Babel the name was seized. At the cross the name was given. The glory had been His from the beginning. He prayed for it on His last night:

“And now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed.” (John 17:5, ESV)

He still waited on the Father to hand it back.

This is what the visitor never knew to come asking for. I keep having to learn it over again, too. Christ gave up his glory and was given it back; we keep trying to manufacture our own glory and calling it worship. We ponder what draws a crowd, decide the crowd has found the weight that matters, and start raising a name for the church the way the people on that plain raised their tower. God did not ask us to build His glory for Him. He asked us to abide in the One who already carries it.

Which takes us where John takes his own readers, in the same letter where he had watched people go: “And now, little children, abide in him, so that when he appears we may have confidence and not shrink from him in shame at his coming.” (1 John 2:28, ESV)

Confidence or shame, at the end of that one sentence. He writes that to church people, not outsiders.

So here is the question the preacher part of me will not let us walk past. On the day He appears, the question will be heavier than the room we filled: did we abide in Him? If we have spent our years raising a name of our own, our own draw, our own version of what the visitor came hoping to feel, we will stand there with a lot to show and nothing underneath it. Shrinking back from the very One we built it for.

I think about that seat of the invited visitor. I never learned what happened. The room thins out. It aches when it does. People come once, or twice, and do not come back. Some of that we cannot help. I have stopped running the inventory the way I used to. The inventory was the wrong question. The question is whether what we have is Him. It should always be this question. We have Jesus Christ to offer, nothing more, nothing less.

The mark He looks for at that appearing is the one John names in the next breath: “If you know that he is righteous, you may be sure that everyone who practices righteousness has been born of him.” (1 John 2:29, ESV)

A family likeness. The Father’s righteousness showing up in people who did not chase their own glory and stayed.

Scripture chain: 1 John 2:19; John 6:66; John 6:68; Genesis 11:4; Philippians 2:6–7; Philippians 2:8; Philippians 2:9; John 17:5; 1 John 2:28; 1 John 2:29 (all ESV)