The Church That Closed Its Doors

It took one hour and forty minutes on a Tuesday night.

Nineteen years, and the end of it fitted inside one meeting with an agenda that had been photocopied that afternoon.

There were forty one people in that room. There had been two hundred and thirty once. The numbers were read out. The lease was explained. The man from the district was kind and clear and had obviously done this before, which was somehow the worst part, that there was a practiced way of doing it.

Somebody asked a question about the piano.

And then there was a vote, and then there was a prayer, and then people stood around for twenty minutes in the way people do, and then everybody went out to their cars.

She was nineteen when she joined that church and she is thirty eight now. She was baptized in that building. She led worship there for eleven years. Her father's funeral was in that room, in the second row, and she can tell you exactly which floorboard has the mark on it where the trestle stood.

That was in March. It is now September.

And here is the thing that has broken something in her, and she has not been able to say it to anybody.

Nobody has treated it as a death.

The people from that church are lovely. She sees them. They say things like, God is doing a new thing. They say, it was just a season. Somebody said, buildings are not the church, which is theologically true and was said to her in a supermarket while she was holding a bag of oranges.

There was no service. There was no notice in the paper. There was no week where anybody brought food, because who brings food when a church closes.

So she has lost a room, and a Tuesday night, and a Sunday shape, and a group of about forty people who all knew her father, and every one of those is gone at the same time, and everybody around her keeps calling it a transition.

If anybody has stood in an empty hall like that, stay with me. There is a verse in the forty second psalm that names this exact loss, out loud, in worship.

The psalmist grieves a room and a crowd, out loud, in a song

Here is the verse, and it is more specific than people expect.

When I remember these things, I pour out my soul in me: for I had gone with the multitude, I went with them to the house of God, with the voice of joy and praise, with a multitude that kept holyday.Psalm 42:4

Read what he actually misses.

Not a doctrine. Not a theological position. He misses going with the multitude. He misses walking there with them. He misses the noise, the voice of joy and praise, and a crowd on a feast day.

That is a man grieving a room full of people and the sound they made.

And he does not apologize for it anywhere. He does not tell himself that God is not confined to a building. He knows that. Everybody in Israel knew that. He grieves it anyway, out loud, and the Holy Spirit put it into the songbook and it has been sung for three thousand years.

You are grieving exactly what the forty second psalm grieves, and you were grieving it in every month since March when it kept being called a season. Psalm 42:4 is the written word putting the loss of a congregation into public worship without one word of correction, and the Spirit who breathed that line is standing on a scuffed wooden floor in an empty hall.

Now notice something else. The psalm opens with the deer panting for the water brooks, and everybody quotes that part. It never resolves. Three times the man asks his own soul why it is cast down, and three times he tells it to hope in God, and the psalm ends with him still asking.

That is what God kept. Not the tidy version.

You have permission from that psalm to be undone by this and to hope in God at the same time, and you were never required to pick one of them. Psalm 42:5 has a man commanding his own soul to hope while he is still pouring it out, and the Holy Spirit did not remove that psalm from the book for being unresolved.

Everything true they said to you was also a way of not sitting down

Now let me protect those people, because she will see them, and I do not want anything sitting between them.

God is doing a new thing. It was a season. Buildings are not the church.

Every one of those is true. Not one of them is a lie and not one of them was said with any malice at all.

But watch what they do. They are all sentences that move forward. Every one of them takes the thing that happened in March and puts it into a shape where nobody has to stand still in front of it.

And people reach for those sentences because a closed church is frightening. It says something about all of them. It is much easier to say God is doing a new thing than to stand in a supermarket aisle and say, we lost it, and I do not know what to do about that either.

So the sentences were handrails, and the people gripping them were the ones steadying themselves.

Keep the people. Set the sentences down on the shelf next to the oranges.

You are not required to hold a doctrine in place of a grief, and you were never obliged to agree that it was only a season. Ecclesiastes 3:4 says there is a time to weep and a time to mourn and puts no exception on what may be mourned, and the Spirit of God does not hand a woman a true sentence in order to close a subject.

A church is a people and a place, and she lost both

Now let me say plainly what she actually lost, because nobody has itemized it and it needs itemizing.

She lost the room. That is real. That floorboard with the mark on it is a real object that existed in the world and she will never stand on it again, and the fact that God is not contained in a floorboard does not make it less real.

She lost a rhythm. Nineteen years of a shape to a week. That is not a small thing to remove from a human life.

She lost her role. Eleven years of leading worship in a place where she knew every voice in the room and which side of the hall the altos sat on.

And she lost forty people at once, which nobody has said out loud. Not to death. But those people are scattered across four other churches now and a few across none, and a friendship that ran on being in the same room every Sunday does not survive being moved to a text message.

And underneath all of it she lost the last place where her father was still, in some way, present, because that was the room, and now she cannot go into the room.

That is five losses arriving on one Tuesday night in an hour and forty minutes, and everybody has been treating it as one small thing that has a bright side.

You are carrying five griefs and not one inconvenience, and you were carrying every one of them since the night the vote was taken. Psalm 42:4 has the psalmist naming the room, the walk, the crowd and the sound as four distinct things he has lost, and the Holy Spirit does not compress a person's losses to make the total easier to look at.