This is Alpha, the first-born, when he was 2YO.
This is Beta, the second-born, when he was about 2YO.
This is Gamma, the third-born, when he was about 18MO.
SCL Old Guest Post – Messing with the Attendance Registry
Mar
3
2022
Here is a guest post I wrote for SCL back in the day (2011 in case you’re wondering). It wasn’t run because I didn’t actually write a full blog post for Jon, I just sent him an outline of ideas. But I decided to fill it out and present it to you today.
It’s been a while since I’ve been to a church that fills out pew-by-pew attendance forms, but a decade or two ago it was not uncommon for certain churches to keep an attedance registry in each pew.
In part of the service (usually during the announcements), the congregation would be instructed to have the person on the end of the pew take the attendance sheet, fill out their info, and pass it to the next person. Then the ushers would collect them all and in theory someone would look at them later. Usually that person would be the church secretary.
On some occasions, I would visit my brother’s church. No, he didn’t own it, it was the church he attended. I had to make sure I sat upstream of him so I got the attendance form first. Because if he got it first, he would fill out his information correctly but then also fill out my information.
Now if you can’t picture the church attendance registry form in your head, you need to picture that there is a line for name and address and phone number, and then there are checkboxes for things like “I am a visitor” and “I would like more information about the church” and “Please contact me about church membership” and various other options. All of which my brother would mark for me.
In this case, we both knew the church secretary (one of my other brothers), so I knew it would go nowhere. But he would also do the same thing in other churches, so I had to be on my guard – check the pew for an attendance book, grab it first or sit between him and the book.
Other times, if relatives weren’t visiting the church, my brother would make up names for the people in his pew. He’d get the number right, so the church attendance figures would not be off, but instead of his name he’d put Clark Kent, or Ronald Reagan, or Barry Sanders, or whatever. Just to provide some amusement to the church secretary during a probably otherwise dreary task.
What was fun was when my one brother forgot to tell my other brother that he wouldn’t be working in the church office that week. Then the backup secretary would have to sort through the attendance records and have to figure out why they didn’t notice Clint Eastwood was in the congregation that week.
Then Elkanah went to his home at Ramah. But the boy continued to attend to the service of the Lord before Eli the priest.
1 Samuel 2:11
This little article thingy was written by Some Guy sometime around 9:44 pm and has been carefully placed in the Humor category.
