My colleague, Jeremy Rhodes, was leading a campus Christian club at a local junior high school. The students were freely sharing why their parents didn’t take them to church anymore. One student confessed that they tried a bunch of different churches in Chico, but none of them ever quite made the grade. Evidently, there are too many “dusty” churches and the mom just couldn’t handle it.
I thought, “I wonder if that family was one of the once-and-done visitors we have had!” Maybe! We have a few dusty corners complete with cobwebs and abandoned stuff. But life is so much cleaner than it used to be around here!
When I arrived at the East Ave Church to interview in July 2002, there are several words that would describe the church campus. The most descriptive may be “cluttered”. There was stuff stored everywhere! Literally! Everywhere! It was not valuable stuff. It was not trash. It was all something in between. And it was everywhere!
Every classroom had it own supply cupboard with a pile of classroom fodder along side. The lobby had an old sectional couch someone donated. There was a misplaced privacy rail in an alcove hiding bags of donated clothes and such.
My favorite piece of clutter was the electric organ – the kind that was installed with furniture sized speakers behind grill cloth on either side of the platform. It was in a lobby off the sanctuary platform. It was kind of a big guy, with the seat and floor petals all stacked up along side. I asked why it was there. I was told that 10 years before it was moved out of the sanctuary because it could no longer be kept in tune with the piano. Ten years it had been sitting there! I asked why it was still there. I was told, “You know, in case someone wants to move it back in.” Like someone is going to reinstate a tone-def organ!
In my first six months I got a 20 yard dumpster and filled it: broken furniture, clutter in the legitimate storage rooms, Christmas and Easter cantata music from the 70s, and anything that we would replace rather than repair to put back into service. Then we did it again three months later filling another 20 yard dumpster.
Some of it was easy to dump. The church people needed to be reassured that every small church and Christian campground had all the off-pitch organs and mimeograph machines they could use. They needed to be reminded that if we ever did reconstitute a choir we would want to buy new cantatas and that there was no end of surplus WWII era desks in Chico.
Other things were more delicate. No one had used the old pulpit for decades in our church. Yet, for all that time it never was far from the center of the platform, living for years in sight on the back wall. Not knowing if anyone thought the pulpit was sacred, I moved it from a visible storage spot to one no one would see. I thought if anyone would miss it, they might ask after it. No one did. It went in the second dumpster!
We cleared the lobby of anything resembling clutter to open it up. We moved all the children’s classrooms resources into a single closet. We cleaned the carpets, chairs and tables — and the walls! Anything that stayed either cleaned up or got a coat of paint. It was a remarkable transformation! Within months the campus began to clean up and appear spacious, maintained and cultivated. It would take years before we actually renovated every room that needed it or fixed every broke resource, but until then, the broken stuff at least looked clean!
Now days, I wonder what I don’t see anymore. It was easy for me to spot the problems when I walked in the doors in 2002. Now, all of the clutter is my clutter. The mismatched furniture and kitschy decor is stuff I moved in. I must regularly ask people to be a fresh set of eyes for me. What has to go? What must be cleaned? What project did we start and never complete?
We must be ever vigilant as to what our church campuses look like to a first time visitor. Bring in friends that don’t go to your church to hurt your feelings. Let them tell you all the ugly your church has to offer. It is better to hear about it from them rather than let everyone judge you!