“We have 60
members today and 200 choir booklets
from 1950.
We keep them ‘just in case.’ ”
“Beneath the dust bunnies, mold and mildew lie
children’s games never opened and ‘Welcome to Our Neighborhood’ letters never sent. We have (no lie) 72 diff erent keys for the building. We have 60 members today and 200 choir booklets from 1950. We keep them ‘just in case.’ ” Acknowledging that it sounds like George Carlin’s
“A Place for My Stuff ” routine, he observed that church buildings become reliquaries for stuff and that council time and energy is fi lled with discussing upkeep and storage. He credits the current pastor with cleaning house and clearing the air, “freeing us to do God’s work.” “Of course,” he added, “in our moments of clarity
and lucidity, we hear God’s word and work to take care of the things that really matter. … If anybody read- ing this needs a Martin Luther Colorforms set, a 1939 fi lmstrip machine, an overhead projector, a lawnmower allegedly owned by [reformer Philipp] Melanchthon, and enough felt animals to fi ll 40 arks, give us a call.” Members of United Lutheran Church in Oak Park,
Ill., also found that cleaning out their building gave them a renewed sense of mission. To maintain their aging building and serve the
community, they needed to get more people through the doors, Sandy Williams said. T at required shred- ding decades-old checks, recycling green hymnals and church directories, siſt ing through papers and ledgers from the Norwegian predecessor congrega- tions, and throwing, among other things, broken toys from the nursery, an old folding machine and Sunday school books from long ago. It was like an
Easter egg hunt for those doing the work,
20
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she said, another egg in every opened cabinet. It caused gnashing of teeth from members, who wanted “things to be like the old days.” “My reply is always that our church is like a large
ship and it takes time to turn it around. And that’s what we’re doing,” Williams said. Joy McDonald Coltvet was one of three staff mem-
bers of Christ Lutheran Church on Capitol Hill, St. Paul, Minn., who spent an aſt ernoon “cleaning house.” Among the treasures: dog-eared copies of Good
News for Modern Man version of the Bible, worn-out choir robes that had gathered dust for a decade, fl ower vases from years of funerals, the belongings of a home- less woman, and an artifi cial trellis leſt by a wedding party.
‘At the end of the
day, shelves looked fresher and spaces looked clean.’
“With comments like
‘the church is not a junk- yard,’ we boldly decided we could part with many things,” Coltvet said. “Perhaps we were inspired by Marie Kondo’s T e
Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up or perhaps it was just time, but at the end of the day, shelves looked fresher and spaces looked clean.” T ere is still more to do, she said, but it was the step
they needed to take “to help our space feel more alive, open, joy-fi lled and ready to receive whatever comes next in our collective story. T anks be to God.” Tom Pairan, Nazareth Lutheran Church, Chatfi eld,
Ohio, also felt a sense of victory: “I found the Ark of the Covenant in the church basement, probably from a vacation Bible school drama. It made me feel like Indiana Jones.”
Author bio: Sevig is managing editor of The Lutheran magazine.
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