The unglorious places where church also happens

The metal folding chair has been in that parish hall for what feels like fifty years and probably is. You know the one: Brown with a slightly bent leg. It makes a specific sound when you open it, the kind that feels familiar before you’ve even set it down.

I’ve sat in that chair at every kind of gathering, a diocesan training, an adult forum, a vestry meeting that went twenty minutes too long, a potluck where someone brought three pasta salads and no one brought dessert. The chair doesn’t know a vestry meeting from a potluck, and neither does the coffee urn.

That urn in the corner has probably not been completely clean in a long while. I mean a very long while. It lives in the kitchen on the countertop, and it’s always a little too hot or not quite hot enough, and people drink it anyway. They drink it because they’re staying. There’s an adult forum worth hearing, sure, and the fellowship is real. But honestly? Sometimes it’s just the children running laps around the folding chairs while the adults pretend not to watch.

Parish halls aren’t designed for atmosphere. The lighting is fluorescent and unforgiving. The carpet holds thirty years of fruit punch and probably a few tears. But those chairs have held people in real pain and real joy, sometimes in the same month.

Holiness doesn’t need good furniture. It might appreciate the places where people just keep showing up. The chair is ugly and still holds us up, and that’s just fine by all of us.