GEOGRAPICAL CHURCH [Sun, 7-14-24]

BEYOND WINTER: Irrelevant Musings of an Old Man—GEOGRAPICAL CHURCH [Sun, 7-14-24]

 

Our guest preacher at church emailed me afterward to say that it was an honor to sit in North By Northwest [NNW] as he waited for the time to mount to the pulpit. That’s embarrassing.

We have a “pass the peace” time at the start of our worship services, which is more of a “good morning, how are you?” period. To try to jar folks out of that rut, I started to say, “Welcome to the Alfred Hitchcock section of the sanctuary,” because our section is actually, geographically, the north by northwest area of the sanctuary, and “North By Northwest” is his best movie. I just wanted to see what folks would say.

For a while some people on the other side touted their area as the James Dean section because it was “East of Eden.” Unfortunately, that didn’t stick. But our preachers talked about NNW as a “neighborhood” in the congregation, especially on “Sit Some Place Else Sunday.” So NNW stuck.

I have been referred to as the mayor of NNW because by habit of long pastoring, when we first came to St. Mark’s nine years ago, I went around the whole sanctuary before worship, greeting people, welcoming them, telling them that this is a church of misfits and requiring them to provide proof of mis-fitness. [I’m not sure our preachers knew about this.] I didn’t want St. Mark’s to get stuck with a bunch of prims and propers who think Christian faith is about “…committing sourselves to ministry,” [1] rather than having a good time, the way Jesus said to. [John 10:10.]

As I get older, I cannot venture too far from our assigned seats in NNW, so now folks drop by my aisle chair [necessary because aisle chairs have arms for pushing one’s recalcitrant body up] to present evidence of weirdness adequate to allow them a seat in NNW.

Yes, NNW is a bad idea. Congregations do have smaller groups within—Sunday School classes, UWF circles, etc. But corporate worship is the one place where we need to be a single, complete body, the Body of Christ. If we have separate neighborhoods, they should at least have biblical names, like the Paul Section, and the Apollos Section. Oh, wait, that might not be the best model. [I Corinthians 3:4-9.]

Helen and I have always gravitated to the left rear seating in any room. Our younger daughter, Katie, is deaf in her left ear, so she needed to have her right ear to the action, plus a sightline of the whole place. [2]

So, when we came to St. Mark’s, by habit we started sitting in the left rear section. NNW. Now we’re stuck with it. Folks who want to leave their current section even ask my permission to sit in NNW. That’s not good ecclesiology.

But it’s a lot of fun.

John Robert McFarland

1] This was part of the graduation liturgy at a Claremont School of Theology some years back, long before Phil Amerson’s presidency there, I’m sure. We can only hope it was a typo.

2] Katie Kennedy’s most recent book, Hearts on Thin Ice, is available by mail or in any book store.