The Organ The New Pastor Sold

I started with Verna Dietz at the care home, and I played her the cassette over the phone, holding the receiver up to my old boombox, and that fierce old woman who had not left her room in a month told me to come get her Sunday morning and not to be late. I called Dale and Peg Sorenson, who farm the quarter section east of town and have sat in the third pew from the back for fifty years. I called the Hovde sisters and old Les Bauman and the whole quilting circle and the men who run the pancake breakfast and every single person I could think of who had sung in that church before Pastor Garrett ever knew it existed.

I did not ask them to be angry. Anger was not the plan. I asked them one thing. I asked them to come on Sunday, and when the new band started up, to not sing a single note. To sit, and to be silent, and to wait. And then, I told them, I am going to need your voices all at once, and when the time comes you will know it.

Some of them cried on the phone. Some of them said it was about time somebody did something. Peg Sorenson said, Marion, I will be there if I have to drive the tractor, and I believed her.

That Sunday, the second Sunday of my knowing, I got to Immanuel forty-five minutes early with Verna Dietz in my passenger seat and a boombox on the floor behind her, and I have never in my life seen that parking lot so full.

They had taken the organ out of the loft and put a stage up where it had been. Black carpet, a drum kit behind a plastic shield, three young fellows with electric guitars and a girl with a tambourine, and two big screens that had been bolted over the places where the stained glass used to throw its colored light across the altar. There were little lights that changed color. There was a fog machine, though thank the Lord they never turned it on.

The church was packed. Word had gone around, the way it does in a town like Harlow, and people had come who I had not seen in the pews in years, and the young families were there too, and Pastor Garrett stood up front in a flannel shirt looking out at the fullest sanctuary he had ever preached to, and I watched him believe, for about nine more minutes, that all those people had come because they loved his new thing.

He welcomed everybody. He said it was a historic day for Immanuel. He said the Lord was doing a new thing. He nodded at the band, and the drummer counted them in, and the electric guitars came up loud and bright with the words to a song none of us knew up on the screens for us to read.

And nobody sang.