A meditation on the contents of the closet in the church basement

When my grandmother died, it was my uncle who was tasked with sorting through her tiny care-home apartment.  "You'll never believe what I found in there," he laughed.  "In the back of one of her closets I found a whole box of carefully ironed and stacked lace doilies..." He paused and his smile widened. "...and under that box? Two more boxes of doilies.  She probably had a hundred of them!"  My uncle and my father then had an argument about who these doilies were going to belong to now.    I recall it being rather brief.  "You take them."  "No, you found them, they're yours!"

I don't know why Grandma had held on to those boxes of doilies for as long as she did. She'd moved twice in years prior, and had downsized significantly both times.  Did she keep them for purely sentimental reasons?  Had they meant something to someone before her?  Did she hold on to them simply because they were in good shape and she was ashamed to throw them out?  Or had she forgotten she had them altogether?

Virtually every church has at least one closet, cabinet, or bookshelf that contains items that belong to the same category as my grandmother's doily collection - things that are in decent shape, things that technically still work, but which haven't been touched in years or decades because they have become unnecessary and/or obsolete.

A rack of choir gowns, a box of filmstrips, a carousel of slides, an overhead projector.  A platoon of cracked faux-leather Bibles in archaic translations. VHS tapes with yellowing labels.  Dusty banners.  40 year old children's books.  Pastel-colored devotional books for teens - published back when I was a teen myself.  A manual typewriter.  Long forgotten props and decorations from Sunday School pageants past. Picture frames containing exceedingly predictable religious artwork.

Once in a while I will find something that is truly fascinating and delightful because of its age, like the time I found a 50 year old box of spiral paper drinking straws in the Sunday school supply cabinet.   Other times I have enjoyed these items because of the sheer horror that they evoke today.  Etiquette manuals for Christian women written in the 1950's are an excellent reminder of how much our culture has changed since then - and how vast the divide must be between the eldest in the church community and the young people that every church says it would very much like to reach.

The church would do well to pay attention to the contents of its closets.   It would do especially well to reflect seriously and honestly about the reasons why it holds on to all these things.   I suspect such reflection would enable the church to draw valuable conclusions about why it is struggling in many sectors to live out the mission given to it by God.

The church should also pay close attention to the items it displays in public areas, as these instantly and powerfully communicate the values of a community - both what it is devoted to, and what it has let slide. Most of our churches are long overdue for a thorough psychological and physical housecleaning.   Great treasures are waiting to be rediscovered under decades of cultural detritus and inattention.  

It is time for our greying congregations to begin to separate the real treasure from the accumulated junk.  If present trends hold it will not be long before someone sorts through our church buildings as my uncle sorted through my grandmother's apartment. These people will not understand our vague and sentimental attachments to these objects or cultural practices. The white doilies and other anachronisms will be discarded with something closer to glee than guilt.

It is therefore extremely important that the church's most ancient and precious heirlooms, the Gospel and the Sacraments, passed down through a hundred generations of hard-fought faithfulness, be clearly and obviously marked so that they are not lost or discarded along with the rest of the adiaphora in the junk pile of Christendom.