The Name Beneath the Family Quilt

For the believer unfolding a family history that has four church names stitched into it.

The first name Christians ever had wasn't chosen by Christians.

That single fact undoes more inherited anxiety than any argument I know, and most of us have never been told it. We assume the word was picked, defended, and then fought over, the way every later name was. It wasn't. It was handed in from outside by people who had no stake in any of it, because the resemblance was too obvious to keep describing the long way round.

Which means the oldest word for your faith isn't a position you're holding. It's a description somebody made of you while they were watching you carry shopping.

She's unfolding a quilt on a kitchen table, and the light through the window is showing up the thread. Her grandmother's panel names one congregation in chain stitch. Her mother's panel names a different one. There's a square from an aunt nobody in the family agrees about, and a corner her cousin added in 2009 with a name none of the others would have recognized.

Under every name stitched into your family's cloth there's an older one, and it was never yours to choose or to defend. The written Word records it being given in Antioch before any later name existed, and the Holy Spirit keeps it alive in you now rather than filing it away as history.

What Four Panels Cost One Woman

The quilt is beautiful, and she can't look at it for very long.

Each panel is a person she loved, and each panel is also a room somebody left. Her grandmother stopped going after a disagreement she never explained. Her mother joined somewhere else and never said why in so many words. The aunt is a whole silence on her own, and the cousin's corner still gets mentioned carefully at Christmas.

So the quilt carries warmth and a quiet accusation at the same time, and she's never worked out how to hold both. When people ask about her background she says "it's complicated," which is true and tells nobody anything.

You've said something like that. It isn't dishonesty and it isn't shame. It's what happens to a person who's been handed a history with four different sorting words sewn into it and no instruction for what to do with any of them.

The Year in Antioch and the Word at the End of It

There's a city in the account called Antioch, far north of Jerusalem, crowded with people who weren't from there.

Believers who had run for their lives came into that city and could not stop talking about Jesus, including to Greeks, which no one had authorized. A great many trusted Him. Barnabas came up to look, and the account says that when he saw it he was glad. He found Saul, brought him back, and the two of them taught in that city for a full year.

Then comes the closing line of the verse:

And the disciples were called Christians first in Antioch.Acts 11:26 (KJV)

There's no ceremony in it whatsoever. No council, no founding document, no gathering to settle what they ought to be known as, and no record of anybody being pleased or offended by the word.

You're described by whose you are before anybody sorts you by which panel you came from. Scripture gives that name to disciples who never applied for it, and the Holy Spirit keeps the description current in you rather than historical.

The Backing Nobody Signs

Here's what I'd take out of that kitchen if I could carry only one thing.

Every panel on a quilt is signed work. Somebody chose the fabric, somebody stitched a name, and somebody meant it. The backing is different. It runs under all of them, it's usually plain, and almost nobody signs it, but it's the reason the panels hold together instead of coming apart in the wash.

The name given at Antioch is the backing. It isn't one more panel competing for space on the front, and it never asked to be. It sits underneath every later name, unsigned and structural, which is precisely why no later name ever had to be unpicked for it to stay true.

You're held by something plain and unsigned that runs under the whole cloth of your family's faith. The written Word puts that name beneath every name that followed, and the Holy Spirit keeps it doing the holding rather than the competing.

This Doesn't Ask You to Cut a Panel Out

Let me say this straight, because there's a version of this message that would wound you and I won't write it.

Not one of those panels is a corruption of anything. Your grandmother loved Christ in the room she was in, and it cost her something, and part of the reason you're reading this is that she did. The same is true of your mother, and it's true of the aunt whatever anybody says at Christmas.

This isn't a replacement for any of them, and it's certainly not a fifth panel. If this word ever became one more square competing on the front of the quilt, it would have become exactly the thing it describes the absence of.

You can keep every panel and still stand on the backing, because holding both costs you neither. Scripture sets the Antioch name underneath every later name without canceling one of them, and the Holy Spirit keeps it load bearing instead of rivalrous.

Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.