The Adventures of the Junior Deacon

When I was in college, I was a deacon in our church, the First Baptist Church of San Luis Obispo. Actually, I wasn't a real deacon. I was a junior deacon. I got to be involved with stuff, but couldn't vote. Kind of like Puerto Rico.

I'm not really sure what a junior deacon was supposed to do, but it should've involved a decoder ring. I really wanted a decoder ring.

One thing I did get to do as a junior deacon was help serve communion. Our church had communion on the first Sunday of each month. There's nothing biblical about having communion the first Sunday of the month; in fact the church we go to now has it on the last Sunday of the month. Jesus just said, "This do in remembrance of Me," so we apparently figured once a month was pretty good.

Serving communion was a big production number at our church. To tell you the truth, it wasn't all that complicated; it was just that any time old guys had to get up and move around during a church service, it involved more choreography than a Broadway musical.

Being a deacon meant that on Communion Sunday, you got to get up out of the pew a few minutes before the pastor finished his sermon and go back into the narthex to line up (the "few minutes" might be more than a few if the sermon wasn't all that great). Then, when the communion hymn was sung, we came down the left and right aisles and stood on either side of the two pastors at the front.

The pastors would take each tray with bread and pass them down until each deacon had one. Somehow there was always a matching number of trays and deacons. This was because the deaconesses were in charge of setting the whole thing up and they were much better at math than the deacons were. If the deacons had had to set up communion as well as serve it, we would've run out of stuff about two-thirds of the way through the congregation.

Then four deacons would start from the back with their trays, four deacons would start from the front and we'd meet in the middle. Nobody ever said anything about it, but it was very competitive as to which group would serve more people: the front deacons or the back deacons. Usually the front deacons did more because a lot more people would sit in the back than in the front. This is where the term "Back-Row Baptists" comes from. We'd serve the bread first, march back up, get the trays with the cups and do the same thing.

Now then: I say "bread" and "cup" because that's what they're referred to as in the Bible. In reality, the "bread" was kind of a small, very bland cracker and the "cup" was a little plastic cup filled in grape juice. The deaconesses had this nifty little squirter thingy to pour the grape juice into the cups.

People laugh at me sometimes when I talk about "deaconesses" at our church, and I agree, it does sound kind of weird. There aren't a lot of things that we put "-ess" on the end of anymore when referring to women. But that's what we called the female deacons -- deaconesses.

My mom was a deaconess for a while. The deaconesses did a lot of thankless work around the church: dinners, showers, other social gatherings. And of course, communion.

Well, I don't know whose idea it was -- whether it was a deacon's, or a deaconess's, or a pastor's -- but someone decided having crackers for communion instead of bread was weird (they never had such thoughts about having grape juice instead of wine; the line of reasoning stopped with the bread). So one month, the deaconesses baked some bread, cut it into little squares and divided them equally into the trays.

Real bread for communion! What a great idea!

So that Sunday, we all lined up as usual and the pastor started handing out the stacked trays, one by one, to the deacon standing next to him. That deacon passed it to the deacon next to him, and so on down the line until it got to the deacon on the end.

But what no one had thought of or discovered beforehand was that the bread cubes would stick to the bottom of the tray above them! We didn't realize it until they started falling to the floor, one by one, as the trays were being passed to the deacons.

I realized something had gone horribly wrong because my friends from the college group always sat in front, and I noticed how big their eyes suddenly got, and how they were all now trying not to laugh out loud during one of the most solemn times in any church service.

I quickly saw what the problem was, along with my fellow deacons, but none of us knew what to do! We couldn't bend down, scoop them up and put them back in the tray. They'd already been on the floor! Everybody'd seen it. Not even the Back-Row Baptists would want those.

So we just left them there and walked up the aisle with what we had, praying that Jesus would once again perform a miracle and multiply enough of this bread to feed our large crowd. We didn't even have any fish.

Somehow, it worked. We had just barely enough for everyone. When we returned to our lines, however, we noticed the bread wasn't on the floor anymore.

While we were gone, the pastor had picked them up and put them in his coat pocket!

Being a junior deacon wasn't always this exciting, but it did have its moments.