One of the most difficult parts of ministry, and the most honorable, is presiding at funerals for beloved church members. But I’m not going to talk about that in this post.
What I want to talk about is the obligation of accepting donated items to a church, and then deciding about their disposition when they don’t really contribute value to the life of the congregation.
This is a touchy subject, so I’ll try to be sensitive. It seems, however, that when something is given to a church, and later a plaque is attached to it saying “Donated in memory of <blank>,” or “Given by <blank> in honor of <blank>,” some sort of emotional force field is activated that prevents anyone from critizing the item or suggesting that it might have outlived its usefulness.
In one church that I served as pastor, there was a rocking chair in the nursery that had been there for years. Only a few of the members of the church remembered the woman in whose honor the rocking chair had been dedicated. Her name was on a small plaque on the chair’s back.
The chair had been repaired several times over the years by one of the members in the church with carpentry skills. But the leg braces were still a bit loose. I had put them back in place a few times, and had discovered that the chair was a bit unsteady, but didn’t really think too much about it. Every now and then someone talked about getting rid of the chair, but then someone would repair it again and there it would sit.
Our second son was of the age to be spending time in the nursery, and one morning one of the matriarchs of the church sat down in the chair holding him, and the chair completely fell apart. She wound up sitting on the floor on top of the shattered pieces of the rocker, holding Peter up in the air above her. Luckily, no one was hurt. Needless to say, the pieces of the chair were in the dumpster in a matter of minutes.
There were also toys in that nursery that had been around for decades. I am honestly not exaggerating, because the chair of the board of the congregation remembered playing with some of the toys when she was in the nursery herself over forty years ago.
So, in an audacious act of bravery, the young women’s group (who called themselves the Other Circle), decided to make it a project to clean out the nursery. Books were tossed. Toys were cleaned or replaced. Later on, my wife and I found a garage sale with tons of pre-school toys and books, and we bought $75 worth and filled the nursery with cool new toys.
Someone also donated an old pipe organ to that church, which had some challenges. First, we had to pay $500 to have it delivered to the church. Then, we had to pay to have it repaired. So, the donation soon became and obligation. It was nice to have an organ in the chapel, but it was rarely used.
So, the other day when a family decided to donate an organ to the church here in town, in my mind I thought, “Here we go again.”
This electronic organ was in the home of an elderly member who was going to be moving to a nursing home. One of her sons decided that the organ belonged in a church, and offered to donate it. As an act of pastoral care, the pastor (my wife) agreed to accept the donation.
So, I was recruited to help remove the organ (from the member’s home, that is). Luckily, the family had access to a truck with a lift, a piano dolly, and two strong young men. That made it much easier.
When we got it to the church, I made sure that we found a home for the organ behind a partition in the fellowship hall. Setting it up in the sanctuary would have been problematic, since we are hoping to diversify the music to include more “contemporary” music.
I had a lot of fun updating my status on Facebook that day with posts like: “Michael is removing an organ this afternoon,” “Michael has placed an organ behind a partition at church,” “Michael hopes no one discovers the hidden organ at church this morning!” And, my favorite was: “Michael is so glad that the organ remained unexposed at church.”
It gives the whole idea of organ donation a new meaning. So remember, don’t donate an organ unless you know someone needs it, and will really use it.
