Prewitt had ideas about the church. He called them growth ideas. He wanted a coffee bar in the narthex, and a sound system with real subwoofers, and what he called a flexible worship space, which meant stackable plastic chairs instead of pews, so the sanctuary could double as a gymnasium for the youth group or a banquet hall for weddings. He had a slideshow, pictures pulled off the internet of churches three times our size in Des Moines and Omaha, all bright open rooms with exposed beams and no pews in sight, and underneath each picture a line about what he called relevance. He showed that slideshow at three different board meetings before I ever heard a word about it, because I do not go to board meetings, I am not on the board, I have never wanted to be on the board, I only ever wanted to sit in my pew on Sunday and hear the Word and go home. Looking back, I think that was exactly the arithmetic Prewitt was counting on, that the people who cared most about the pews were the ones least likely to be sitting in a folding chair at a Wednesday night meeting to defend them.
The board voted on a Wednesday night in April. I was home with the worst cold I’d had in five years, in bed with a thermometer and a mug of Hensley’s chicken broth that my friend Harwood had dropped off on her way home from the meeting, not knowing yet what had happened in that meeting, or she would have driven straight to me instead. Nine board members showed up out of twelve. Prewitt had prepared a bid from a salvage company out of Des Moines that restores architectural pieces for restaurants and breweries, twenty-two thousand dollars for all fourteen pews, oak like ours being hard to find anymore, and he had a second bid from a chair company for the stacking chairs that would replace them, and between the sale money and the savings on a new sound system he had already priced against expected donations, the math worked out clean on his spreadsheet. Seven votes for. Two against. My pew, and Iverson’s forty years of hands going out the fellowship hall doors on a Des Moines flatbed, decided while I was asleep with a fever, by a man who had lived in this county for two years.
I did not find out until Sunday, when I walked into the sanctuary and saw the notice taped to the bulletin board. Pew removal begins Monday, April 20th. Donated architectural salvage sale to fund sanctuary renovation. Questions may be directed to the board chairman.
I stood in front of that notice for I do not know how long. Long enough that Pastor Fallon, who had only been with us two years and had voted for the sale because Prewitt told him it was what young families wanted, came and stood beside me and did not say anything, because there was nothing kind he could say that would also be true.