I have served as an usher in almost every church I’ve attended since I came of ushering age.
I remember well the first time I carried the brass plate down the aisles at First United Methodist Church in Williston, Florida.
Though you watch a church service all of your life and think you are well-tuned to the nuances, until someone puts you in charge of the order of worship or hands you an offering plate, you don’t have a firm grasp on the proceedings.
That first Sunday as an usher, I proved I didn’t have a firm grasp on the proceedings.
In FUMC Williston, the ushers received the plates at the front of the church, but, since there were three different sections of pews in the church and four alcoves, the ushers had a few specific rules to follow. Rowdy Yeoman wanted folks to stick to the rules.
I didn’t know the most important of those rules is to never work a pew from behind. I did that very thing on my first Sunday. Rowdy let me know in a firm but not impolite tone to, “never do that again.”
I’ve taken that to heart, and it makes sense.
Passing the offering plate can be among the most confusing times in a church service.
On short rows, people aren’t sure whether to pass the plate through or hand it back to the usher. A good usher will tell them what to do.
I am a connoisseur of good ushering. One of my life goals was to be a part of the Herdsmen. They were the fictional ushers from the First Lutheran Church at Lake Wobegon on NPR’s A Prairie Home Companion who competed in the ushering national championships. They wore blazers with an “H” stitched on the lapel.
While passing the offering plate for a slim crowd can be tricky, we didn’t have that problem on Christmas Eve at First Presbyterian.
While I was not an usher, I did participate in the service of the communion elements.
For the first time in my memory, one set of servers exhausted their original supply of the communion elements and had to refill about two-thirds of the way through.
I can’t ever remember that happening at any church I’d been in before, and it’s a good thing. It means the pews were full.
The pews at FPC Greenville have been full the last three times the doors were open in December.
Two of those reasons were for sending people off. One was for Clarke Reed’s funeral and the other was for our interim pastor Eddie Bellis.
Eddie wasn’t here for long, about 19 months, but he was here to serve as a buffer from the previous pastor to whomever our next pastor might be.
Luckily for us, Eddie was more than just a gap filler.
He jumped right into both the works of the church and of our community.
He also spoke a good sermon.
Eddie’s sermons often had an obvious end point from the opening setup, but you wanted to see how he was going to get to the endpoint.
That’s the mark of really good preaching.
He also didn’t shy away from calling out the problems in our church and our world.
He is moving on now to another church in the same position we find ourselves in. Finding a person who can both stand in front of you every Sunday and be a part of you every other day is a difficult task.
It’s why good pastoring, like good ushering, is always done from the front and not from behind.
Jon Alverson is proud to be the publisher and the editor of the Delta Democrat-Times. Write to him at jalverson@ddtonline.com or call him at 662-335-1155.
