// Pastor J.H., partner since 1997
The first December.
I remember the first December the parcels came to our church. There were nineteen of them on a pallet, wrapped in clear plastic, and the driver apologized because one of the sugar bags had split open in the bed of the truck and dusted three boxes with white. We opened those three together in the fellowship hall, brushed them off with a dish towel, and sent them out anyway. A woman on our distribution list — she had been widowed that August — took hers home and returned the next Sunday with a tin of molasses cookies for the crew. I have kept that tin. It is on a shelf in my study. It rusted through years ago but I have kept it.
// Brother W.C., shed foreman since 2011
The pot.
People ask me about the coffee pot. The truth is I don't know where it came from. I came on as foreman in January of '11, and it was already there, sitting on the same folding table it sits on now, and the pastor before me said it had been there since before his time too. We have replaced the power cord twice. We have descaled it with vinegar every spring. The first Thursday of every month I pour out the grounds and think about everyone who has stood next to it and not said anything in particular. That is most of what the shed is, I think. Standing next to something and not saying anything in particular.
// Sister M.T., draft-patch crew, twelve seasons
A winter kitchen.
The house I remember most was a little four-room on the far side of the ridge, belonging to an elderly couple who had raised six children there. By the winter we were called, the husband had passed and she was alone, and the wind was coming through the kitchen wall where the siding had failed. We patched it from the outside with house wrap and new cedar on a Saturday, and on the Sunday she sent word through her pastor that she had slept the whole night without waking, for the first time since November. I have thought many times that a ministry can do worse than to help a widow sleep through the night.
// Chaplain R.D., visitation ministry since 2006
The pocket paten.
I have carried the pocket paten on perhaps eight hundred visits. It is cherry wood, made by one of our carpenters who has since gone home, and it has a small brass latch that sticks in humid weather. I keep it in the inside left pocket of my coat. In twenty years I have never once been asked what is in the case, and I have never once failed to have what was needed inside of it. I take this as a small, repeating providence.
// Pastor E.L., partner since 2002
The furnace.
The furnace went out on a Sunday morning in February, between the eight-o'clock service and the ten-thirty. I called the board clerk from the church office phone. He answered on the second ring. He said, "I'll make a call." By Tuesday morning the replacement had been ordered; by the following Sunday the sanctuary was warm. I have never gotten over the ordinariness of it. No committee, no application, no three-bid process. He made a call, and a furnace came. This is, I suppose, what the charter means by "the simplest path between a need and its meeting."
// Sister A.P., Thursday-crew volunteer since 1998
Twenty-seven years of beans.
I have packed, I think, something close to fifteen thousand parcels in my time on the Thursday crew. I can no longer lift a twenty-five-pound bag of beans by myself, so I have been moved to the sundries station, where I count out jars of peanut butter and cans of corn. My hands know the rhythm. My mother, who also packed with us until she was eighty-four, told me once that the work was a kind of small liturgy, and I have come to agree with her. The coffee gets poured. The boxes go down the line. The tape gun makes its small sound. A parcel is sealed. Another parcel is sealed. A truck pulls away in the morning. I am not sure the gospel looks much different, on a Thursday evening, than this.
// Board clerk, term 2020–present
The archive box.
The archive box is a banker's box, slightly water-stained on one corner from a roof leak in 2013. It holds the charter (the yellow legal-pad page, now laminated), the minutes of every quarterly board meeting since January 1995, the annual reports, and the chaplain's log. It weighs about eleven pounds. When I was seated as clerk, the outgoing clerk handed it to me across the folding table in the back room of the shed, and said, "This is most of what we have." I think that was an understatement and also, in another sense, exactly correct.