Roots

On Saturday, my niece’s wedding will be held in a Church of Christ.

Well, technically, that’s incorrect. As my pals back in the C of C would say, the wedding will be held at the building where the Church of Christ meets. “The people are the church,” as our ministers used to say.

I haven’t been in a C of C in almost eight years. My mother still attends the one closest to her home … her home, in fact, used to be the parsonage. (Well, technically, that’s incorrect. Her house was never the parsonage, because the C of C doesn’t have pastors or parsons … just preachers or ministers.)

What odd birds we were. I remember lots of horn-rimmed glasses and preachers with names like Flavil and Cecil. My family was one of those families that make up the backbone of the congregation, always on our pew whenever the doors were open.

You might think our regular attendance would breed confidence in our salvation — but it didn’t. We worried obsessively about the status of our souls, terrified that one tiny spiritual oversight, committed before we could repent of it, would send us straight to Hell.

Take churches (or, technically, church buildings) and kitchens. As a group, our branch of the C of C wasn’t so hot on having a kitchen in the church building. There’s a scripture somewhere that says, “Don’t you have homes to eat and drink in?” Never mind that the context of this scripture has to do with a bunch of folks who wanted to make communion into a drunken brunch. Context, you see, makes it harder to strain at gnats, so we preferred our scriptures without it.

Debates raged over whether or not God minded having stove and a sink in one of the back rooms. Our congregation — always skilled at finding fine lines to walk — ultimately decided to forego the kitchen (even though, paradoxically, we could and did eat inside the building during “dinner on the grounds,” wedding receptions, and Vacation Bible School).

With time — after years of heating food elsewhere and washing dishes in the women’s room sink — the church did build a kitchen … but it had to be in another building, completely detached from the church building. Someone suggested connecting these with a catwalk, so the ladies’ beehive hairdos wouldn’t wilt on rainy Sundays … but that got shot down, since no one could resolve whether connecting the two buildings would, technically, make the seperate building an addition, which would, in God’s book, very probably make the whole thing part of the church building … and therefore problematic.

Years later, I would come across a church in northern Mississippi that came up with an innovative solution to this dilemma. They built their kitchen in a seperate building and built a cat walk connecting the two buildings … but had the catwalk roof stop inches short of the church building door. Then they added an overhang that jutted out from the church building, but did not touch the roof of the catwalk. Voila! Their clever engineering protected their hairdos and their souls.

This week, for my niece’s wedding, I’m going back to the C of C.

Pray for me.