Ritual and Change

You may wonder why I, who usually care so much about aesthetics and presentations posted a grainy picture of dingy brown carpet which appears to have been vandalized. This month, my church is replacing the carpet in the gym with a new floor. The carpet has been there more than thirty years. Last week, the children and teens were invited to “trash the carpet” by writing or drawing on it with permanent marker. As you can imagine, they loved it!

I wondered what I could add. Three decades of memories gave me a lot to pull from. I tend to be nostalgic, but gross brown carpet wasn’t really the situation about which to get overly sentimental.

Then I had it! I wrote the refrain I heard at the end of every Sunday night service my entire childhood and part of my adolescent years. “Stack the chairs 11 high!” You see, our church was very careful with their funds, yet we were always growing. When the congregation could no longer fit in the original chapel building, two back-to-back services were held in the gym. On Monday, the gym was needed as a gym again for the youth group. And so, chairs were stacked and unstacked every week. This lasted until we had outgrown the gym as well and built a new sanctuary.

Stacking the chairs 11 high was a ritual, a very practical one, but still a ritual. Rituals sink deep. Habits have heavy consequence. Rhythms shape us in unintended ways. It was a small thing, but it taught me wise stewardship. It taught me that there shouldn’t be a sense of entitlement in coming to church. Instead, there should be an expectation of service. It taught me mystery. Why did they have to be stacked 11 high instead of 10 or 12? This was vaguely unsettling to a child who preferred nicely rounded numbers.

Much has changed. We no longer stack the chairs 11 high every Sunday night. And I’m certainly not grieving the loss of the carpet, or all the allergens it hosted, or the rug burns it caused. There have been bigger changes too, changes in the pastoral team and staff and church members over the years, changes in program and policy. Children coming to our church today will almost certainly remember different catch phrases and rituals than I did. I hope these new rituals are ones that teach them, even in small ways.

I’m also thankful that our core beliefs remain the same. I’m thankful that the more significant rituals of baptism, the Lord’s Supper, preaching of the word, prayer, etc. still persist with the same weight. And we are still his body, his dwelling, though the building has changed and will change again.