I Can Name The Founder

She was filling in a form. That was all it was.

A form for something at the hospital, and it asked for denomination, and she wrote it in the box the way she has written it in boxes since she was nineteen, and then she sat in that waiting room with the pen still in her hand.

She could tell you the man's name. She could tell you the century, roughly, and the country, and one story about him that gets told from the front every few years, and the thing he is famous for saying.

And she thought: and before that?

She sat there and went backward from him, and there was nothing.

Not a doubt. Nothing like a doubt. She was not sitting in a hospital waiting room wondering whether any of it was true. It was more like standing at the edge of a photograph and realizing the photograph has an edge, and beyond the edge there is white paper, and there had obviously been a room the photograph was taken in.

She knows the last two hundred years of this. She knows them well. She has been in this her whole adult life.

And the first eighteen hundred are a blank with about four famous names scattered in it, and the hundred years right at the start, the ones with the people who actually knew Him, she could not have named one of them without the New Testament open in front of her.

You know that edge.

Maybe you can name a founder, or a movement, or a revival, or a year that gets said a lot. Maybe your whole sense of where you came from is a building your grandparents helped pay for. Maybe it is one preacher on the radio in 1988.

And whatever your edge is, past it there is white paper, and it has never once occurred to you to ask what is out there, because nobody ever said there was anything.

The crowd is bigger than the part you can see

Here is a sentence written to people who were, at the time, a very small number of very new believers.

Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us.Hebrews 12:1

Compassed about. Surrounded. On every side.

And the whole chapter before it is a list of who is in that crowd, and it is not a list of the people in the room. It is Abel and Noah and Abraham and Sarah and Moses and Rahab and Gideon and Samson and David and a long paragraph of people whose names are not even given.

So the writer says to a handful of frightened new believers: you are surrounded, and here is who by, and every one of them is from before you.

You are surrounded right now by a crowd you did not assemble and mostly cannot name. That is not a warm thought I am adding to the verse; compassed about is what the verse says, and it hands the reader a list they had no part in making (Hebrews 12:1), and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a crowd of the long dead feel like company rather than trivia.

And notice the direction of the sentence. The crowd is not there to be studied. The crowd is there so that a person running gets on with running.

Nothing here is a complaint about what you already have

Let me say this plainly before we go further, because a page like this can turn sour in a paragraph and I am not going to let it.

The name you can put in the box is a good name. Whatever it is. Somebody paid for what you were handed, and they handed it on carefully, and the two hundred years you can see are not a mistake or a shrinking or a corruption of anything.

Nothing on this site will ever tell you that your tradition failed. Not yours, not anybody's, not mine. That is an argument, and an argument belongs somewhere else, and the moment a page like this starts prosecuting a room it has stopped handing you anything and started taking something off you.

You have been given something real, and what is on offer here is more of it and not a replacement for it. Scripture calls the whole company one body, and says the eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee (1 Corinthians 12:21), and the Spirit who holds that body together is not in the business of setting one part of it against another.

So the edge of your photograph is not a fault. It is just an edge. And there is a room out there past it.

Who is in the part you have never seen

The hundred years right at the start are the ones worth walking into first, and there is a simple reason.

Everybody in them was Jewish, or had been brought into a movement that was entirely Jewish when it started. Every single person in the earliest part of your own lineage. The men who wrote what you read on a Sunday. The women whose houses the whole thing met in. The people who first said out loud that He was risen, and who said it in a city where they had every reason not to.

They were not a preface to your movement. They are your family, at the far end of it, and the line from them to you is unbroken whatever name you write in the box.

You have a family that runs back two thousand years, and the part you can name is the near end of it rather than the whole of it. The word says ye are come unto the general assembly and church of the firstborn, and to the spirits of just men made perfect (Hebrews 12:22-23), and it is the Holy Spirit who is the one thing every single person in that line has had in common, from the first house in the first city to a woman with a pen in a waiting room.