I’ve never written about one aspect of church we take for granted.
We may take it for granted, but the folks who hew them from wood don’t.
I imagine they love pews, those dark-stained wooden benches no church is without, even inactive, empty ones.
Many a day I have settled onto a pew as others intone me to become a better man.
Many a moment I have listened to others’ fire and brimstone sermons, which strike my eardrums and bounce away at the speed of light.
Up and down I go as we stand and sit, stand and sit. “Turn to page 276, verses 1,2, and 3.”
There have been moments of boredom when lesser speakers and cliché marriage ceremonies failed to mesmerize me. That’s when that old pew turned to stone.
What say you? Shoot straight, now. Don’t waffle.
Well, we all can admit that tears banish the pain of sitting on hard, fine-grained wood.
The funeral of a loved one is a time when I fail to notice just how uncomfortable those austere wooden benches can be. Another discomfort takes over altogether.
We shouldn’t take pews for granted.
Wooden with a stiff back, holes for communion glasses and racks for hymnals pews provide a place to sit for many a soul.
Yes, I’ve seen pews equipped with thick cushions, but those seem a luxury.
As I’ve written about air conditioning in churches, you should be a tad uncomfortable during a sermon. What’s a little heat compared to Hell?
And what’s an ungiving wooden bench when you could be sitting on a blistering rock down in that place we’re to avoid at all costs?
Two pews stand out in my recall.
Over in rural Georgia I can spirit you to a place along a back road that can be impossible to find.
Should you discover it and should you get a tour, as you walk through the kitchen of this fine old home-turned-inn, stoop a bit until window light catches the wooden countertops just so.
You’ll see sizeable depressions in the wood at regular intervals where the wood has been compressed into large circular basins.
So, what do we have here? An old pew turned countertop where the same well-padded ladies sat for decades. They become real estate. Folks claim them as their own and sit in them Sunday after Sunday.
My other memorable pew? I sat in it Easter Sunday, our family pew, the one near the old Regulator clock that has long been ticking and keeps on ticking.
Dad’s gone, Mom’s gone, and the places where they sat now hold us younger people. We are just passing through, and the church struggles mightily.
Someday, perhaps as another church, that pew will accommodate new folks who come to hear the gospel and leave feeling a tad better about the world.
I don’t think any derrières will mark our family pew, but I know this: The old wood will remain as unyielding as ever as souls come and go.
As congregations and preachers come and go, pews become unflinching constants, even in dead churches. A few pews, however, take on new lives. Some even become countertops.