Skip to main content

Stuff that doesn't go anywhere else, and some hyperbole.


Now that I’m caught up with Sunday visits, I think I’ll try to post some midweek thoughts about churches in general, The Church, my own ridiculousness, and anything else that seems relevant. Some of it might be serious, but mostly not.  It’s good to write again, even for an audience of ten.
  • You know how places like classrooms and meeting rooms and churches have unwritten but rigid seating charts? That’s another anxiety of mine—am I sitting in someone’s seat? One Sunday, I was quite sure we were doing just that. They stopped, they stared, they looked around, puzzled. What is happening to my WORLD? they seemed to think. They stumbled blindly to another seat, disoriented, and sang all the songs half a beat late. Sorry, people who usually sit there.

  • A friend wrote this comment on a satirical link I posted about introverts in church: Have you seen the new blog by the Berrien County Ministerial Alliance? Yeah, every week a different minister/preacher/pastor posts about this church shopping couple that's making the rounds. They rate the couple on a scale of 1-10. What I’ve noticed is that the couple keeps getting dinged a few points because of the wife’s introversion. 
Very funny, dude. Also very true.

Comments

  1. UnknownJuly 17, 2018 at 12:22 PM

    I recently read an article about why people always sit in the same section of the same pew every week, sit at the same lunch table at work or school, claim the same area of the floor during gym workouts. The reason for this, the article said, was because out of so many choices throughout the day or week, by choosing the same seat or place, there is one less choice to make. Makes sense to me. I have found that when someone is in "my spot" I have the opportunity to experience things from a different perspective. You see, "my people" are still sitting in " their spots" so the same message can have a different dinamic just by sitting somewhere else! Adventuresome!!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. ~JanJuly 17, 2018 at 12:30 PM

      I love this outlook. Sometimes being just a tiny bit uncomfortable is good.

      Delete
    2. Yvonne BlakeJuly 17, 2018 at 1:11 PM

      We're like cows to our own stalls. *smile* To defend it, though - when we were raising our children, we often came from various Sunday School rooms to the main sanctuary for the Morning Worship service. The kids never had to wonder where we were sitting. They knew, and sometimes got there before we did.

      Delete
  2. Joy BachJuly 17, 2018 at 12:39 PM

    Love you

    ReplyDelete
  3. Emily GibsonJuly 17, 2018 at 1:44 PM

    Yup, I shake things up with our seating chart and we try to make it into all four quadrants of the sanctuary over the course of a year. It actually does lend a different perspective because your seatmates are not always the same. Look at it as helping others stretch their personal envelopes a little bit when you are having to stretch a whole bunch!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Catrina BradleyJuly 17, 2018 at 2:39 PM

    The people who sit in our area have formed a relationship over the years - it's kinda like an informal small group. :) When someone new sits there, I welcome them and sit beside them. :D I heard the most horrible thing from a visitor once. He asked if he was in my seat, and I told him he could sit where ever he liked. He said that last Sunday someone asked them to move. I was APPALLED! And apologized profusely. :( I pray that never happens to you, Jan. I have a feeling it would crush you.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. ~JanJuly 17, 2018 at 2:53 PM

      This comment has been removed by the author.

      Delete
    2. ~JanJuly 17, 2018 at 3:02 PM

      It wouldn't crush me--but I'd leave the seat and head right out the door, shaking the dirt off my feet in the doorway.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Baptist Roots (but not deep ones)

Little Baptist me Ben and I married in 1975, when he was 23 and I was just a few days past my 20 th birthday. We’d both been raised Baptist—not the super-conservative independent Baptists, nor even the very conservative Southern Baptists, but American Baptist, the most mainline protestant Baptist (but still pretty conservative, for all that). Only two generations before us, Baptists weren’t allowed to play with cards or dice, to go to movies, to dance, to drink alcohol. That was gradually loosening up by the time we married, but both of us would still have considered ourselves conservative, evangelical Christians at that time.             I’ll say right off, though, that even as a very young woman, I had a bit of a rebellious streak, and I wasn’t as Baptist as my upbringing. In college, I became involved with a church that was part of the hippie-ish charismatic movement that was blooming in the 70s. The church was different and exciting, but there were definite cult-like aspec
7 comments
Read more

In Which I'm Pretty Sure I Know Exactly WJWD

The little Free Methodist church in our hometown was a great place for us when our girls were little. Attendance there was under 100 even in its best years, but there were enough people so that our daughters got a good Christian education through Sunday School and mid-week programs. We enjoyed being in a small choir, having a group of close friends who were also raising children at that time, and assuming leadership positions that we never would have held in larger churches (I’ll come back to that in a few paragraphs). We went through several pastors, but the last one stayed for eighteen years, and he became important to us both as a friend and as a counselor during difficult times.             During our time as Free Methodists, my own faith underwent considerable transformation. The change was gradual at first, reflecting changes in the culture at large. In just about every cultural movement or social issue, I found myself tending toward views that were more liberal and more Demo
6 comments
Read more