The Story Hour In My Front Room

The Sunday Pastor Enright spoke

I did not know Gary Enright had heard any of it until the first Sunday in Advent.

I was back in the pew by then. I had never stopped going to church. I only stopped keeping the nursery. I sat where I always sat, three from the back on the left, and Gary got up to preach, and he set his notes down and then he did a thing preachers do when they are about to go off the notes, which is he took his glasses off.

“I want to talk this morning about where a church actually is,” he said.

“We think the church is this building. These walls. This roof we just fixed.” A little laugh, because the roof had been a saga. “But I’ve been here since spring, and I’ve been learning this congregation, and I’ve learned something that embarrassed me a little, in a good way.”

He did not look at me. He did not look at Darla, who was in the second pew where the preacher’s wife sits.

“There’s a woman in this county,” he said, “who was, for a long time, the heart of how this church loved its littlest ones. And through a set of circumstances that don’t need airing, that work moved out of this building. And do you know what she did? She didn’t quit. She didn’t go sour. She opened her own front door. And right now, a mile from here, on a Saturday morning, there are more children learning to love a story and learning they are precious than this building has held in years.”

The hall was very quiet. I looked at my hymnal.

“I had it backwards,” Gary said. “I thought the church sends people out. Sometimes the church is wherever the sent-out person lands. Sometimes the kingdom just picks up and moves down the road a mile, and the smartest thing the rest of us can do is follow it there and help.”

He put his glasses back on.

“That’s all. Let’s sing.”

He never said my name. He never said Darla’s. He did not have to. And I will tell you that took a bigger man than people gave Gary Enright credit for, because the easy thing, the thing that would have made him look good, was to name the villain and name the hero. He did neither. He just set the thing right in the air where everybody could breathe it, and then he let us sing.