SCL

The church my dad started in Marlboro, Massachusetts did not feature a “Sit behind Pastor Choir” or SBPC if you will. (I don’t think his new church does either but if you are in the Chapel Hill area you should check it out and verify that.) Until I went to college at Samford University, in Birmingham, Alabama I’m not sure I even knew Sit Behind the Pastor Choirs existed.

The first time I saw one in a big church I kept waiting for the pastor to release them to go back to their seats with us civilians. The song was over. Job well done. Move it along. But they just stayed there, perched behind the pastor, frozen in place until the sermon concluded.

At first I tried to ignore them and focus on the message that was being preached or the announcements that were being delivered, but I had a hard time. I’ve never been officially diagnosed as ADD but I probably have at least a smidge of that. Maybe even a dollop. Plus, I was a mess in college and living way outside of God’s will for my life back then. So before long, I started to watch the members of the choir, as if I was tuning into channel WSBPC.

But with choirs that sometimes numbered over 100 it was hard to focus on the whole gang of people up there. So I tended to look for 5 primary types of choir members …

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“Hi, it’s nice to meet you, lady who is making me late to church.”

I didn’t say that a few weeks ago when my wife stopped my speed walk to the sanctuary so that I could meet one of her friends after dropping off our kids in Sunday School. That probably would have been rude to proclaim, but that was what I was thinking. Standing there watching people stream in the open doors and fill up the seats, I could feel myself getting anxious.

“We’re going to be late. We’re going to be late. Oh the agony, so close but yet so far away. Any second now they’re going to close those doors and we’ll have to sneak in along the baseboards like some sort of rat or hamster scurrying for birdseed that the Acuffs may have left in the garage without thinking that a rodent the size of a small cat would find it, eventually get stuck on a glue trap, scream so loud you could hear it in the house and then get murdered by a grandmother across the street because you were at work and couldn’t come home.” (Whoa, that just got personal.)

And although we weren’t late that day, I know it’s going to happen. We’re going to show up behind schedule and need to sneak into church at some point, so I went ahead and wrote myself a guide on the best way to come into church late. Without further ado:

7 things you need to know about sneaking into church late …

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