Church Friday

Today is the first day of the annual Pastor-is-out-of-town week-long free-for-all bonanza. Wow, there are a lot of dashes in that sentence. I'm not even sure if I'm using them correctly to be quite honest. OK so it's not really a free for all bonanza but it does feel a bit like the days in school when we would have a substitute teacher for a day. Or the days, few and far between, when it was sunny enough in the greater Seattle area to have P.E. outside. To maintain an order of semblance, those of us who were not on vacation did our best to keep the universe in order by having service programming and music/media team meetings anyway. Had we not done so, today could have felt a little too much like a Thursday. If you are not aware, Thursday is unofficially the "Church Friday". Around here we take Friday off so we can have two consecutive days off instead of the "Monday and Saturday off" model. Which is nice. I've done it both ways and consider the current dispensation to be greater than the former. When we come in to the office on Thursday we all greet each other with a hearty "Happy Church Friday!" Also when we see each other randomly at Starbucks or wherever on actual Friday, we say "Happy Church Saturday." You'll notice the lack of an exclamation point at the end of that greeting. It is usually because we are in a crowded Starbucks in Fairwood* and it just isn't appropriate to shout greetings in Christianese there. You won't find Church Friday and Church Saturday on regular or "secular" calendars but they are found on official church calendars ecumenically. So today is Monday or, as it is less commonly referred to: "Church Tuesday", but it felt a little like Church Friday which is of course actual Thursday. It sounds complicated but after a while, you get the hang of it and it becomes "Second Nature", which of course is "Church Nature". As in: "We had our service programming meeting today" "Was it weird without Pastor Troy and Jana there?" "No, we've done it so many times it was like Church Nature."


*I motion that the Fairwood Starbucks should be deemed the official Starbucks of New Life Church and that all off-site church business/ministry meetings be conducted there.