When you work in a church you never know what a person’s visit might bring, but you always have to be ready for that stranger through whom God has something to say.
A few days ago a little man with curious eyes and a gentle smile walked into the gallery and took a look around. He spent 15 minutes or so examining the sanctuary and then hovered at the entrance to the main office. I got up to say hello and as we began chatting in the hallway I looked him over and realized this 79-year-old man was dressed completely in white, from his tufty hair to his sneakers. I chuckled to myself thinking maybe I was meeting my own Clarence from It’s a Wonderful Life.
Lisa Cole Smith
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That’s when he told me he was the electrician who worked on the initial construction of our building in the early 1960s. He told me stories about the workmen and the details of how he laid the wiring. I couldn’t believe I was talking with someone who had seen this place at its conception, before Convergence was a twinkle in anyone’s eye.
He seemed happy to see the original light fixtures still in place blending in with the changes we’ve made. When I told him how God has used his work for ministry in multiple generations he smiled and told me he used to feel like he hadn’t done enough for God. It seemed to him that true disciples were ministers or missionaries and he felt bad because he had never found a way to be anything other than an electrician. He told me it took him a long time to realize, “God needs people who aren’t afraid of getting in the dirt, people who build and make things with their hands!”
He told me a story about how one day while he was working on our building he got curious about the bricklayers and what they did. He wondered; “How hard can it be?” and walked over to where they were getting ready to break for lunch to ask if he could give it a try.
“Well, sure!” they said. “Why don’t you see what you can get done while we are at lunch?”
So, he picked up a trowel and started to set bricks into cement and slowly build a row. At this point in the story he looked at me and said, “You know what? Bricklaying is an art! I couldn’t get anywhere. Those bricks wouldn’t lay flat and they looked nothing like the ones the guys had been working on.”
When the bricklayers returned from lunch they laughed and called out: “That’s as far as you got?!”
He said he learned a lesson that day that stuck with him for years. He realized that if bricklaying was an art maybe electrical work was too; maybe what he contributed to the construction of this church couldn’t be done by just anyone. Maybe his electrical work would be just as valuable to the ministry as any sermon ever preached here.
I felt like my Clarence had come to reinforce something I should never forget: my work as an artist is just as important as my work as a pastor. I am not more aligned with God’s will because I work in a church. Musicians who play in Sunday worship are not necessarily more faithful to God than those who play in clubs on Saturday night. Painters and writers whose subject matter are seeing the intimate and extraordinary in ordinary things are no less called by God than those who explore overtly biblical material. Faithfulness is in using our gifts and talents because God made us that way.
People have been comforted, married and mourned in this space, but no less important is the ministry of people’s hands and creative vision. That co-creative work of hands has guided and helped shape 66 years of ministry and I am reminded that the changes and improvements we make now will guide and shape the next 60 years. Without their willingness to labor we would be at a loss.
Those who work with their hands make something invisible visible. They take an idea and birth tangible reality. They participate with God in his calling to be co-creators, to risk the joy and challenge of celebrating our human-in-God’s-imageness by doing more than just talking — by accepting the invitation to get a little dirty.
Lisa Cole Smith (lsmith@convergenceccfnet) is pastor of Convergence: A Creative Community of Faith, a Baptist congregation in Alexandria, Va.