PEWS

Marty Kittrell photo

'Tis Sunday, the Ides of May, and I can just imagine the fervent Spirit of The Faithful is rising like incense to heaven all over the South. Not that it’s faint or puny anywhere else---the South’s just what I’m used to, and I guess I'm just thinking of all my umpty-leven years of church attendance in the part of the country with Sunday School, Sunday Church, Sunday Night Church, BTU, Prayer Meeting on Wednesday night, Choir Practice somewhere in between there, and assorted Ladies Groups, Men’s Breakfasts, Girls’ Groups, Boys’ Groups, and Kinderfolks playtime---well, they didn’t coin the phrase “Every Time the Doors are Open,” for nothing.


Ours was a small church, with a not-too-rapid succession of good, Godly men as pastor, a really good choir and musicians, and the usual assortment of members, young to old, and all in between. The music was wonderful---loud and melodic and with good foot-pattin’ rhythms of “At the Cross” and “Leanin’ on the Everlasting Arms,” to the quiet calm of “Just as I Am” and “It Is Well.”

The podium was a plain brown boxy one, with a little slanty top, just like the one in the auditorium at our school.   The table just in front was a long-ago varnished one, with the usual “This Do In Remembrance of Me,” carved into the front panel.    The top was gently battered by the thousands of set-downs of the just-passed offering plates, and was demurely covered on Lord’s Supper Day by a snowy cloth ironed into stiff-starched primness, to befit the solemn import of the rite.  Those trays of stiff little bread-shards  and the tiny cups of grapejuice, always appearing to me as somewhere between carousel and centrifuge, were tended by tender hands, set out and cleaned and put away like a King’s Treasure.  A big brass stand in the middle of the table held an immense Bible, always open to the day’s passage.

Baptist preachers don’t preach sermons. They Bring the Message. From fiery, fist-pounding lectures with the scent of brimstone in the air, to soft, pleading entreaties that elicit tears and more than one sobbing trip down the aisle to Salvation.

And the pews. There’s no piece of furniture on Earth quite like a church pew. They range from rough-hewn flat square benches, the better to keep the congregation awake and alert in their upright severity, to graceful curved sways of architecture which leave the arms and legs on each end a good several inches forward of the mid-point of the length. Looking down from behind the podium in some churches, on the curves of the pews neatly nested one behind the other down the room, is like looking past waves to a far horizon.

Internet Photo



 The finish on pews is smooth and satiny, with the backs and the seats worn even smoother than planes and sandpaper could make them. Generations of sit-down-and-get-up, along with countless wiggling children, bored and fidgety teenagers, innumerable slide- downs to make room for late-comers, along with Sinner-Squirm and Spirit-Filled-exhilaration---those have all given the old pews a polish like the glow of a well-loved Camaro.


You’ll never find that Gleam of Glory on a plastic folding chair or a velvet flip-down theater seat, no Siree-Bob.

Photo by Marty Kittrell