I just couldn’t resist borrowing this one off the net:
An older lady visited a church one day. The usher greeted her at the door and helped her up the stairs. “Where do you want to sit?” he politely asked.
- “On the front row, if you don’t mind.” she answered.
- “You really don’t want to do that”, the usher said. “The pastor is really boring.”
- “Do you happen to know who I am?” the woman inquired.
- “No ma’am.” he said.
- “I’m the pastor’s mother,” she replied in an aggravated manner.
- “Do you know who I am?” he then asked with a grin.
- “No.” she said, still aggravated.
- “Good”, he answered and then left the building.
If you want to discuss boring, in church environments, I’ll take you, immediately, to the Deaf section, where hearing people seem to thing ALL we need is an interpreter.
Back in 1985, while I was touring with The Tenth Coin Ministries, we stayed in Arlington, TX, where I picked up the Religion section of the Saturday newspaper and noticed an article, written by the Rev. Wilbur Huckeba, whom I’d know (Wilber was the pastor of the Crusselle-Freeman Church of the Deaf in downtown Atlanta until his death about ten or 12 years ago.
I spoke, with Wilbur about this article, the following summer, at a Deaf retreat and he repeated many of the things in the article.
For example: Expecting a Deaf person to sit in a church service, staring at an interpreter, who, other than her hands, is immobile, is causing Deaf people NOT to learn. According to the article, a hearing person’s attention span is about 22 seconds, meaning you will have to blink and, when a hearing person blinks, he/she loses nothing.
At the same time, a Deaf person’s attention span is closer to 15 seconds and, when WE blink, everything we’ve seen is lost!
Not only that, according to Wilber, hearing leads into memory much, much better than seeing.
When CFC called Wilber Huckeba to become their pastor, he required them to build a stage, where the old altar had been. His plan (and he did this for around 30 years) was to move around, while he preached.
This is how he held the attention of the Deaf congregation and kept the membershp of CFC around 250 for the entire time he was there.
Here’s a second tho’t: A few weeks after Helen and I married, after the church service, my mother-in-law told us she’d thought her husband was snoring in church and elbowed him in the ribs.
In reality, it was the 450 lb. choir director, who had a bad case of sleep apnea, from whom the noise was emanating!