The Organ The New Pastor Sold

For forty years, every wedding in that town was carried by that organ. Every funeral. Every Christmas Eve, when they would turn the electric lights off and pass the little candles down the pews, and Verna would start the first soft chords of Silent Night, and you would hear six hundred pipes breathe the whole room full of something you cannot get any other way. I have buried my parents to that organ. I have watched both my daughters married under it. When Eldon himself passed two years ago this March, his heart quitting on him in the garden with a trowel still in his hand, it was that organ that played him out, and Verna wept so hard through How Great Thou Art that the whole church sang the last verse for her while she just sat with her hands in her lap.

I thought that was the saddest I would ever be inside those walls. I was wrong about that too.

Pastor Garrett Shaw came to us fourteen months ago. He was thirty-one years old, and he came from a big church down in the suburbs of the Twin Cities, one of those places with a coffee bar in the lobby and a parking lot the size of a soybean field. He wore skinny jeans and sneakers up front and talked into a little microphone clipped to his ear, and when he preached he walked back and forth and never once stood still behind the pulpit that four generations of Immanuel pastors had stood behind.

I will be fair to him, because my Eldon would want me to be. The young families liked him. Attendance ticked up a little that first year, and we had not seen that in a long time. He was good with the children. He remembered names. I baked him a pan of my rhubarb bars when he moved into the parsonage and he wrote me a card back, which was more than the last pastor ever did.

But he had an idea about us from the start, and the idea was that we were old and dying and in his way.

He called it modernizing worship. He wanted screens up front where the stained glass had always framed the altar. He wanted a band, with electric guitars and a drum kit and stage lights, the kind of thing he had grown up with. He had a saying he used in council meetings, and I heard it secondhand a dozen times before I ever heard it from his own mouth. He would say the church was not a museum, it was a mission, and we could not reach young people while we were, and I am quoting him exactly here, chained to a dusty relic that was holding us back.

The dusty relic was the organ. My husband’s organ. Forty years of his Saturdays.

I did not know, that winter, how far he meant to take it. None of us did. He talked about a sound system the way a man talks about a truck he is thinking about someday. The council, which had three of his young families on it by then and only two of the old guard, nodded along in that way people nod when they do not want to be the one who says no. Nobody voted on anything I ever heard about. Nobody stood up in front of the congregation and said, we are thinking of selling the organ, what do you all think. If they had, I would have been in that fellowship hall so fast it would have made his head spin, and I would not have been alone.