Four of us in the small room on a Wednesday, chairs in a circle built for nine, and somebody says it before we start. Where two or three are gathered. It is a kind thing to say about a thin turnout and I have been grateful for it more than once.
Nothing about the quotation is wrong, which makes this one unusual.
Nothing is misquoted here
For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.
Matthew 18:20 (KJV)
Word for word, that is the verse. No hymn writer, no almanac, no proverb that drifted in from somewhere else. The sentence arrived intact.
What moved was the room around it.
Before it, a lost sheep
Look at what Jesus has just finished saying. A man has a hundred sheep, one wanders off, and he leaves the ninety-nine on the hills to go and find it. Then the application: it is not the will of your Father that one of these little ones should perish, in Matthew 18:14.
The very next words are the ones people quote at a small meeting, except they do not start where the meeting starts.
Moreover if thy brother shall trespass against thee, go and tell him his fault between thee and him alone: if he shall hear thee, thou hast gained thy brother. But if he will not hear thee, then take with thee one or two more, that in the mouth of two or three witnesses every word may be established.
Matthew 18:15-16 (KJV)
There is your two or three. They are the people you bring along on the second attempt, after the private conversation has failed, because you are still trying to get somebody back, and not a prayer group counting heads.
The number is courtroom language. Deuteronomy 19:15 sets the rule for how many witnesses an accusation needs before it will stand, and Jesus is quoting it nearly word for word: “at the mouth of two witnesses, or at the mouth of three witnesses, shall the matter be established.” Paul reaches for the same formula twice, in 2 Corinthians and in 1 Timothy, and both times he is talking about discipline.
The paragraph is the lost sheep written out as a procedure: go after the one, go alone first, and if that fails take two or three and go again.
But verse nineteen is about asking
The tidy version of this correction overstates itself.
Again I say unto you, That if two of you shall agree on earth as touching any thing that they shall ask, it shall be done for them of my Father which is in heaven.
Matthew 18:19 (KJV)
Verse nineteen is a promise about asking and about the Father answering, and verse twenty begins with for, which grounds it. So anybody who says the passage has nothing to do with prayer is reading past a verse.
The honest account is narrower. The paragraph is about restoring one person, and prayer is inside it, because the second attempt is the kind of thing you would pray your way through. Nowhere does it become a statement about attendance.
One translation puts the small group into the verse
The New Living Translation prints it this way: where two or three gather together as my followers, I am there among them.
Notice that the phrase does not sit beside “in my name.” It stands where “in my name” was. A footnote gives the Greek as gather together in my name, which is that edition showing its work. The Amplified Bible makes the same interpretive move but keeps “in my name” in the text and puts the gloss in square brackets, which is another way of letting a reader see that a hand has been on it.
The effect either way is to shift the subject from the two or three in this procedure to any two or three believers anywhere, and that is the reading which ends up on coffee mugs, and on a page on this site that quotes the verse in exactly that translation.
The New Living Translation is not my target here. I am pointing at the printed page the small-group reading physically comes from, because for a reader who owns only that edition, the small group is simply what the verse says.
Step one is the one I skip
I have been an elder long enough to know the whole procedure and I could recite it to you: go alone, then take two or three, then tell the church.
Most of the time I do nothing instead. I let it go, I tell myself it will settle, and I am usually aware while I am doing it that letting it go is not one of the three steps. Step one is a conversation with one person in a room with the door shut, and it is the most unpleasant twenty minutes in the job.
The man who wrote the procedure down was no braver than me. He just had a Lord who kept talking about the one sheep.
The promise is bigger, not smaller
The corrected reading gives something back.
If the verse is about attendance, it is a consolation prize for a poorly attended meeting. Read where it sits, and it is a promise made about the hardest thing a church ever does. Two or three people are going to somebody who has hurt one of them, to try to get him back rather than to be rid of him, and Jesus says he will be standing in the middle of that.
The chapter does not stop there either. Peter asks next how many times he is supposed to forgive a brother who keeps doing it, and gets seventy times seven, and then a parable about a man who was forgiven and would not pass it on. Go and get him, says the chapter, and when you have got him, forgive him. That is the errand Matthew 7 leaves you standing up for, once your own eye is clear.
Hebrews is the verse that actually tells you to keep meeting. James describes the same movement as Matthew 18, one believer wandering off and another going after him. And Colossians is what you need before you knock: the willingness to let the thing go once it is answered.
Four of us in a circle built for nine is fine. He is there. But he said it about a harder errand than ours, and if we ever go on that one, he will be there for that too.