We Only Gather Sitting Down

This family gathers. Nobody could say otherwise.

Sunday there are eleven of you. Birthdays there are more. There is a table with too many chairs pulled up to it, and there is a corner where the small ones eat off their knees, and it goes on for four hours and it is good.

And every single minute of it happens sitting down.

You worked this out during the last one. You stood in the doorway with a dish in your hands and looked at the whole family, three generations of them, and every person in that room was seated.

Then afterward the ones who could moved to the other room and sat down again in front of something, and the small ones went to a corner with a device, and at about six o'clock everybody stood up for the first time in order to leave.

And nothing is wrong with any of that. I want to be clear. A table is one of the best things God gave a family and I am not about to write an article against it.

But you have noticed something that you do not have a way to say, which is that a family which only ever gathers seated has quietly become a family that gathers to consume things. Food, television, a photograph on a phone that gets passed around.

Nothing in the week has all of you in the same place using your bodies at the same time. Not one thing.

So this is not a complaint about your Sundays. This is one addition, ten minutes long, at the front.

From house to house, which means walking

There is a description at the end of Acts 2 of what the first believers actually did, and it is almost always quoted for the table part.

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, King James Version)

Continuing daily with one accord in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, eating their food with gladness and singleness of heart.

Everybody reads the breaking of bread. Almost nobody reads the four words attached to it, which are from house to house.

You have a passage here that is famous for a meal and has never once been only about the meal. Acts 2:46 puts the moving between houses in the same sentence as the bread, and the Holy Spirit is the one who knits people together in the going as much as in the sitting.

You are able to picture what that actually looked like, and it is worth doing. It was not a dinner party. It was a group of people who ate somewhere, then walked, then ate somewhere else, then went up to the temple, then walked again.

They were on their feet constantly, in each other's company, with the eating happening at intervals along the way.

And there is one accord in that verse, twice over. It is used for the temple and it hangs over the whole of it. Being of one accord is not something a group of people talk themselves into. It is a thing that happens to people who move around together.

You are looking at a household that has kept the bread and lost the walking between houses, and Acts 2:46 has never once separated the two of them. The Spirit of God is the one who makes one accord out of people who are in motion together, and the verse holds the meal and the moving in a single line.

Which is exactly what has happened to your Sundays, over about fifteen years, without one single decision being made about it.

Before anybody sits down

Here is the instruction, and the timing of it is the whole thing.

Do it before. Not after.

You are able to put ten minutes at the front of Sunday, and doing that has never once required anybody to give up one minute of what they came for. It is written in Acts that they broke bread from house to house, and the Holy Spirit is the one who adds something to a family without taking anything away.

Everybody knows what happens if you suggest a walk after the meal. Half the room is asleep, two people are doing the dishes, somebody has to leave at four, and the suggestion dies politely on the table.

So it goes at the front, before anybody has taken a coat off properly, while everybody is still standing up in the hallway anyway, which is the moment when a family is already on its feet and has not yet arranged itself into chairs.

You say: before we sit down, everybody out, ten minutes, to the end of the block and back.

You have the authority in this house to say that sentence, and being the grandmother has never once meant your part is only to feed people. The Spirit of God is the one who moves a whole household out of a hallway, and Acts 2:46 puts the going from house to house right beside the gladness of heart.

Expect some resistance and expect it to be entirely token. Somebody will say it is cold. Somebody will say they have shoes on. Somebody who has driven for an hour will say they need to sit down.

Say: ten minutes. Then we eat.

And go. Because it is genuinely ten minutes, and because the food is still there, the resistance evaporates in about ninety seconds, which is faster than any argument would have finished.

Everybody, at the speed of the slowest

Now the part that makes this a family thing rather than a walk.

Everybody comes. Including the ones who cannot walk far, and the speed of the whole group is set by the slowest person in it.

You are permitted to make the pace of this the pace of the least able person in the family, and doing so has never once been a compromise. It is written in Acts that they ate their food with singleness of heart, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a group of very unequal bodies into one accord.

If there is a wheelchair, the block is chosen to suit the wheelchair. If your knees mean the end of the block is your limit, then the end of the block is the walk, and the teenagers can go round twice and come back to the group.

That last part matters. Let the fast ones loop. Do not slow them down to keep the shape neat, and do not speed anybody up. A family moving at four different speeds along the same street is still a family in one place.

You have three generations who will not be in one room forever, and ten minutes on a sidewalk with all of them has never once been a small thing. The Spirit of God is the one who gathers what is scattered, and Acts 2:46 describes people who were together daily and in motion when they were.

Then come back in, and sit down, and eat, and let the four hours be exactly what they always are.