I am reminded of a little rhyme my mother taught me when I was a child. Some entertaining hand motions went along with it, and during church services I would sit in my cushioned pew entertaining myself with both the rhyme and the motions.
Maybe you remember it. It goes like this:
“Here is the church. Here is the steeple. Open the door and see all the people.”
Do you remember it?
Most of the time, identifying a church is quite easy. There are distinctive features on the outside of a church building. A steeple, a cross, encouraging words on the sign out front, colorful stained glass windows depicting pictures of Jesus and children are all “identifiers” that say….”Here is the church. Here is the steeple.”
But quite often it is difficult to “see all the people” who worship inside a church. In my little rhyme, the “people” were all of my intertwined fingers wiggling around as I unfolded my hands. There were 10 of them, and not one of my fingers ever moved away or missed a service. All 10 were always in attendance. The “people” were my favorite part of the rhyme. They mattered more to me than the church or the steeple.
It’s still that way for me today. People matter more to me than buildings and steeples. I think they bring life, community, and relationships to a church. We attend a church to draw strength from one another. We hold one another accountable to be true, honest and strong in our faith. We work together. We laugh and cry together. We change the world, together.
In reality, we don’t let our church buildings fall into disrepair and become outdated. We polish our steeple. We mow our grass and paint the window trim so that everything looks “up-to-date” and fresh. Why don’t we do the same for our member directories? I think we should.
I think of a church directory as a “family directory,” and I think it should list each of us, as we are today, not last year, two years or 10 years ago. It should reflect the “today us,” the “today” church.
Church leaders should care about a member directory’s usefulness and its ability to accurately represent the church family. An outdated printed directory gives the impression that members, families, and people are not a priority, when in fact, they should be. It also gives the impression that the church is stale, stagnant, and outdated. People do not like stale, stagnant, outdated anything, especially not a church.
We are in a new millennium, and churches are actively trying to attract and keep “millenials,” the younger generation that utilizes technology for nearly everything. An outdated, printed directory gives them the wrong impression. Getting current and getting online shows them you prioritize people, that you embrace technology and the change technology brings.
My daughter is part of the “millennial” generation, and when she was a young child, I taught her the little church rhyme, the one my mother taught me. Even now, as a young woman, she still remembers it.
I recently showed her the new online directory her father helped design. As I started showing her, I began repeating the little rhyme, “Here is the church. Here is the steeple,” and when all of individual faces appeared on the church directory’s webpage, her face lit up and she finished the rhyme on her own, “open the door and see all the people.”
Yes. Open the door and see all the people.