The Rev. Canon Tim Elliott, a ministry consultant with Elliott Clarke and Associates, offers these "Notes from the Narthex." From this vantage point in the church's lobby he can peer into the church or open the door and look outside, all the while staying safe in the narthex.
A church I visited recently has a new minister. He follows someone who was there a long time and was well loved. I could see it was overwhelming for him to be with all these people and wonder if he’d ever get to know them.
I remember that feeling. Each time I moved it was awful. Saying goodbye to one set of people was hard enough. But suddenly, there was this whole new group—all of whom knew a lot about me already, and I had no clue who they were as individuals. And what overwhelmed me was getting to know all their names.
What helped me was to keep a small clipboard with me on Sunday mornings so I could jot down questions about people that I could ask some of my key folks about—who’s the woman who sits by the window? The one with the big hat? Who’s the guy who helps people get in and out of the elevator? It was like a crossword puzzle in a way.
Sometimes I could fill in the name of the person by myself. Other times, it filled itself in as I completed other parts of the puzzle, if you know what I mean.
I developed little tricks for remembering people’s names, which worked for the most part.
But even after being in a congregation for several years, there were a couple of embarrassing occasions where I should have waited and not tried too hard to get the name right. One was asking a woman how Roy was? “That was my first husband whom you buried,” she said.
Then there was a nice guy I really liked, but I could never remember whether it was Dave or Bob, and in trying to impress him, and maybe myself, I always got his name wrong. He didn’t stay with our congregation very long.
Once, when I was a new assistant, I visited the quilting group with my rector. There was one woman who didn’t come to church and he asked her, while we were chatting, why not? She said that whenever she came, he couldn’t remember her name.
He promised—I was there with him—that if she came the following Sunday he’d remember her name. So she did, and as she shook hands at the door, she said, “Now, what’s my name?”
He looked at her vacantly and said, “I know you—you’re Wednesday morning!”
When we say hello, it’s the beginning of a conversation that may lead to a relationship.
Clergy share in the ministry of the Good Shepherd who calls the sheep by name. Part of that is being known by name. A church congregation offers many people a community where they can be known by name.
As a minister, it occurred to me many times that getting to know people by name was one of the most important things I could do. Each name was tied to a person. Each name had a story to it, which was the story of that person’s life.
And so I said a prayer for the new minister as I watched him cope with this, and hoped that it wouldn’t be too long before he would know most of the names.
