For believers whose care for one another runs across four towns and no headquarters.
Most people read straight past one sentence in Acts, and that sentence changed the shape of the church permanently.
Trouble breaks out in Jerusalem after Stephen is killed, and the believers scatter. They go out through Judaea and Samaria, away from the one city where the whole movement had been centered, away from the apostles, away from the rooms where they'd learned to pray.
From the inside that had to look like the end of something. The center was gone. Everybody who knew what they were doing was somewhere else entirely. There was no building, no meeting, and no address to give anybody who asked.
What actually happened next is that the message traveled further in a few years than it had in the whole time it stayed tidy. The scattering wasn't an interruption of the church. It turned out to be the shape of it.
Say that carefully, because it isn't a claim that your dispersal was a strategy, and it isn't a suggestion that God arranged your loss for a purpose you ought to be grateful about. It's an observation that what you are holding has a long history, and the history isn't one of failure.
Christ is the head of this body, and a head is not a headquarters. Scripture that into a letter for scattered people, and the Spirit keeps that headship live across every mile between you and the others.
The Four Towns and the Casserole
Let somebody describe what you actually have, in case nobody ever has.
There's a woman an hour north who knows which week your appointment falls in. There's a man in the town east of you who fixed a car for somebody in this group and wouldn't take money for it. There's a household two hours away who've fed at least three of you at their table this year.
Nobody runs this. There's no center, no rota, no building, and nothing that could usefully be printed. If one of you moved tomorrow it would reorganize around the gap inside a fortnight without a meeting being called.
You have been calling that a lack. Four towns and no headquarters, you say, as though the missing pin were the important fact about the map.
Look instead at what the map records. Care moved. Food moved. Money moved once, quietly, and the person it moved to still doesn't know all of who sent it.
You are in a body whose life is already moving through you, whatever the map is missing. Scripture describes the members supplying one another rather than reporting to a center, and the Spirit keeps that supply in motion.
Who the Head Actually Is
Here's the verse, and the first six words are worth reading twice before the rest.
And he is the head of the body, the church: who is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead; that in all things he might have the preeminence.Colossians 1:18 (KJV)
He is the head. Not the building, which cannot be a head. Not the leadership, which is made of members. Not the city where it started, which had already been left behind by the time this letter was written.
A head is not a headquarters. A headquarters is a location that coordinates activity from a distance. A head is a living part of a living body, joined to every other part, and a body doesn't need its head to be nearby, because the head is never somewhere else.
That's the correction your map needs. You've been looking for a headquarters and grieving its absence, when what the church has is a head, and the head hasn't moved.
Paul wrote those words to a congregation he'd never visited, in a town he'd never seen, which is itself worth noticing.
You have a Head rather than a headquarters, and He has never once been away. Scripture's letter as written gives Christ that place among scattered people, and the Spirit makes His nearness a present fact across four towns.
Structure Is Useful and It Is Not the Life
Be careful here, because the lazy version of this would hand you a new problem.
Structure isn't the enemy. A rota isn't an insult, a building isn't a cage, and the people who organize a week are usually the reason anything gets done for anybody at all. When you had structure it carried real weight, and some of what it carried you're now carrying yourself on a Tuesday night when you're tired.
So I won't tell you structure was the problem. What I'll tell you is that structure was never the life. It was the shelf the life sat on, and shelves are worth having and are not what you eat.
That distinction is the whole of it. Lose the shelf and you've lost a convenience. You haven't lost the loaf.
You can miss the structure honestly and still hold everything it was carrying. The written Word puts the life of the body in its Head rather than in its arrangement, and the Spirit supplies that life to members with no arrangement at all.
I Am Not Going to Build You a New One
Say what this refuses to do, because you'd otherwise spend the whole piece bracing for it.
I'm not about to hand you a plan. No rhythm to keep, no minimum, no five practices of the scattered believer. You left a place that measured you, and it would be a poor kind of help to hand you a fresh ruler on the way out of the door.
If the four of you settle into something resembling an order, let it grow out of the care you're already giving rather than out of a paragraph somebody wrote for you. If it never settles into anything at all, the verse above is still true tonight.
The map stays exactly as it is. What changes is the word you've been writing across the middle of it.
You're free to keep what you have without turning it into a rule. The Head doesn't issue rotas, and nothing in that letter suggests He ever intended to.
Take the Pin Out of Your Hand
The turn here is a small physical change in how you hold a piece of paper.
You've been standing over that map with a pin, looking for the right place to push it in. North, east, your own kitchen, somebody's living room. Nothing has felt central enough, so the pin has stayed in your hand for two years and the map has started to look like evidence against you.
Put the pin down. The map isn't incomplete. It's a map of a body whose center isn't on it, because He isn't a location that could be marked in the first place.
Every line of care you drew between those four towns runs to Him before it runs to the town at the other end. That's why the whole arrangement keeps working with nobody running it.
You can put the pin down, because the center of this body was never going to appear on a map. The written Word's letter sets Christ as head over a scattered church, and the Spirit holds every line on that page to Him.
Declare this over yourself
You are in Christ and Christ is in you, so what follows is not a claim made out of your own authority. It is agreement, said back to God in His own words, while the Holy Spirit carries it. How He orders the rest of it is His to decide, and He answers in His own way and in His own time.
Speak this from inside Christ rather than out of your own resources. He lives in you, the Spirit carries the words, and the timing of anything that follows is not yours to set.
Say it once, and mean the last sentence.
Christ is the head of this body, and a head is not a headquarters. Scripture says that He is the head of the body, the church, and he wrote it to scattered people who had no headquarters either. The Spirit holds every line of care between these towns and runs each one to Him first. I am not looking at a lack. I am looking at a body doing what a body does when it has a Head instead of an address. I put the pin down and keep the care.
Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.
This message is free. Nothing here is locked, nothing is for sale, and nothing is being asked of you.
Colossians 1:18
This message is free, and always will be. There is nothing to unlock, nothing to subscribe to, and nothing you owe for having received it.
