Do you think more people would go to church if there was karaoke? The acolyte and Mrs. Trahan could do a duet to 'How Great Thou Art'. The rest could sing along, they just wouldn't be miked.
We went to church every Sunday from the time I was 7 until I was about 17. And then for some reason, when my parents were deprived of the joy of waking their daughters up on Sunday mornings, when Maria and I had left the nest, and Pete and Irma just had each other, they stopped going. My mom says she's not going back to Peace Lutheran because the new pastor used to be a mechanic. My parents started going to Peace Lutheran way back in the 70s, when it was just a few Lutheran lambs following Pastor Laatz. Now some auto-mechanic is leading the flock.
A couple years back, on their way to the Christmas Eve candlelight service, my dad almost turned into the parking lot of St. Columba's, the Episcopal church. He was tired, and it's quite reasonable that he would get lost. They've only been going to 71 Loma Drive for 30 years. My mom came home from that service talking not about the miracle of Jesus' birth, or the beautiful service, or the old friends they saw, but laughing about how they almost became Episcopalian.
My goal as a church-going teen was to make my mom laugh out loud in church. For all her Lutheran-Finnish seriousness she was a good sport. She has always been a 'church laugher.' My sister and I used to change the words of the hymn from 'when I fall on my knees with my face to the rising sun, oh Lord have mercy on me' to 'when I fall on my face with my knees to the rising sun.' Irma loved that one.
With the mechanic at the helm, my mom worships at home. She keeps up on the church gossip through Jeff, their life insurance rep. (Apparently the pastor who served Peace Lutheran before the mechanic is no longer a pastor. Controversial.)
I promised I wouldn't tell anyone about the time when my mom was on altar duty and accidentally let the Eternity Candle extinguish. Oops.
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