Front and Center

For Wilshire Baptist Church

If you’ve been near the office at Wilshire recently, you’ve probably seen the large, framed print of the congregational photo that was taken by Allan Akins in September. It’s the same cover photo at the top of Wilshire’s Facebook page. It’s a beautiful, lively photo showing the church as it truly is – the people and not the building. Still, I cringe when I see it because standing front and center is LeAnn and me.

On photo day we should have been in our regular places: me in the balcony and LeAnn with the choir. But we volunteered to help bring in the preschoolers and that put us up front. I had lobbied that we release the kids to their families and melt into the congregation ourselves, but people who know better about children said we should stay with them. So, there we are, front and center.

It was an unintended fluke, and anyone who knows me well knows the last place I ever want to be in any photo or any room or any event is front and center. I don’t do selfies. I don’t jump to the front and volunteer to be the leader. My mother can tell you that when I was in the children’s choir at our church growing up, I stood at the end of the row, and not just the end but behind the person at the end of the row. I’m happy to be standing on the fringes or even out of sight.

My fear is that decades from now someone will study the photo and ask, “So, this man standing in front in the dark suit and the gray hair – he obviously is the pastor, but I don’t remember him at all? When was he the pastor?” If they looked closely to the right and left, they’d find the real pastor and associate pastor and minister of music standing in the aisles with the people of the church.

In the early 20^thcentury when churches took grainy black-and-white photographs of their congregations for posterity, the protocol of the day usually had the pastor and his wife front and center. That’s fine with me because pastors easily earn that privilege. Standing front and center, they rightfully can say, “These are all the people with their messy lives that I have to tend to on a daily basis.”

But it says something about Wilshire that everyone gets to stand front and center from time to time. Not just in a photo, because that’s just a metaphor for what happens at Wilshire. A better example is the list of deacons and committee members that we affirmed at our annual church conference last Sunday. They work shoulder-to-shoulder with the paid ministers and staff to keep the church and its mission moving forward. On any given day, any one person on that list of hundreds of people is working front and center on something, even if nobody knows it.

So, this message needs to go into a time capsule with that photo: No, that is not the pastor standing in the front of the church in the photograph taken in 2018. (And that’s not the contemporary pastor standing to his left, although if he was preaching I would definitely sit and listen.) Those are just people who were trying to help out and landed in the wrong place at the wrong time. But happily, they were in a good church at a good time.