Saturday Morning At The Feed Store

There are five or six of them on a Saturday and it has been going on so long that nobody organized it.

You get there about nine. You get what you came for. Then you stand around the tailgates in the gravel for forty minutes talking about the rain, and the price of everything, and whose boy is playing where, and a running argument about a tractor that has been running since about 2014.

He has invited two of them to church, once each, years apart.

Both times it went the same way, which is to say perfectly politely. A pause. A nod. Something about how they might, sometime. And then a slight change in the air for about three weeks afterward that he could not have proved to anybody and knew was there.

He has not asked again. He is fifty six and he is not stupid and he could read what happened.

And so he has settled into a thing that he would describe, if you got him talking, as respect. He has decided that his faith is his business and that those men are not going to come and that pushing it would cost him five friendships he has had for thirty years.

Here is what sits underneath it, though, and he only said it once, on a Sunday afternoon, to nobody in particular, looking out the window.

He said: "The best men I know are never going to hear any of it."

That is a real grief. It is not a small thing. And he has drawn a conclusion out of it that is not true, which is that because they will not come to the building, there is nothing to be done.

He taught where the working men were

There is a short verse in Mark, easy to read past, that tells you where Jesus spent most of His working life.

And he went forth again by the sea side; and all the multitude resorted unto him, and he taught them.Mark 2:13

Take that in the gravel on Saturday. You are standing in a sea side and calling it a lot. The word says He went forth again by the sea side, and all the multitude resorted unto him, and it is the Holy Spirit who put you there beside them.

By the sea side. That is not scenery. That is the working end of a fishing town: boats, nets, wet rope, men who had been up since four and who smelled like it.

He taught in synagogues too, and He went to the temple, and none of that is being knocked here. But the great bulk of what got said got said outdoors, in the places where working men were already standing, at the hour they were already there.

They did not resort to a building. They resorted to Him, in the place they were.

So hear this in that gravel lot, and know it is not my comfort, it is what is written: you are standing in a sea side, right now, most Saturdays at nine o'clock. His word says He went forth by the sea side and taught them, and it is the Holy Spirit who has had you in that gravel for thirty years beside the best men you know.

There was a preacher in England in the seventeen hundreds who ran into the exact wall you have hit. The people he most wanted were never coming through a church door, and the churches were closing their pulpits to him anyway.

So he went outside, and it very nearly ruined him socially.

He preached at coal pits at five in the morning because that is when a shift came up. He preached in market squares on market day, and in churchyards when they would not give him the building, and to a crowd of miners so black with coal dust that he could see the tear tracks on their faces.

He never said a word against the gathered church. He loved it and he stayed in it his whole life. He simply stopped requiring that a man walk into it before anybody would speak to him honestly.

And note what he did not do. He did not build a technique, and he never counted anybody. He went to where they already were, at the hour they were already there.

Your men have a time and a place and they keep it every week without fail. That is not an obstacle. Most of the church would give a great deal for a standing weekly appointment with five men who trust them.