Three Cheers for the Church Office

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The other day I received a newsletter in the mail from the First Baptist Church of Russellville, Alabama. That in itself is not a remarkable event since I’ve been receiving those weekly newsletters for 39 years. During all that time I’ve never given much thought to it, but each week, regular as clockwork, the First Baptist Messenger has arrived in my mailbox.

Even though First Baptist is my home church, I haven’t attended there on a regular basis since I graduated from high school in 1970. During the early years I came back often to visit, but life being the way it is, those visits became less frequent. I suppose I’ve been to 3 or 4 services in the last 25 years, the most recent time being in 2005 when I spoke at their Homecoming Sunday. 

So even though I always think of First Baptist as my home church, the ties that hold me to the church are mostly the invisible ties of memory. And yet for all these years they have kept me on the mailing list. They kept mailing the newsletter to me during my college years, my seminary years, during every move I made from Alabama to Tennessee to Texas to California to Texas to Illinois and now to Mississippi.

Somehow they kept track of me long before the computer era. Dolores Bolton served as the church secretary for decades. Now Lynn Suddith serves in the office. And there have been many others. 

I suppose the whole concept of mailing a church newsletter is fading away. With the advent of the computer age, maybe mailing something out will become too labor-intensive and too expensive. But I am grateful for the folks in the church office at First Baptist. They always knew where to find me.

Pastors come and go, but the church office remains. And for 39 years the folks at First Baptist have been looking after me from a distance. 

So three cheers for the church office. Since 1970 I’ve been a lot of places and pastored churches in three different states. But for all those years the folks at First Baptist have kept in touch through the weekly newsletter. When I was younger, it didn’t mean as much. But now that I’m almost 57, well, it’s nice to be remembered by the folks who knew me way back when.