I’m on vacation this week so my blog will be a bit dormant. Here’s a post I put up about three years ago:
I’ve led different classes on spiritual gifts, but church ushering has never come up as a possible gift. Hospitality is a spiritual gift so one could say that ushering is hospitality (and I certainly think it is), but as far as I know ushering itself isn’t listed. I’m going to declare it an unofficial spiritual gift, though, because we experienced the gift of ushering last Sunday and what a blessing that was.
The second service at the Chicago Temple (First United Methodist) is at 11 a.m. so you would think that leaving a little before 9 would have given us plenty of time to get there. Uh, no. We had promised the kids that we’d go out for breakfast so our first stop was at the restaurant Yolk for pancakes (the kids had Oreo pancakes and we had to be breaking some sort of parenting rules by allowing them to eat this–with syrup, no less). By the time we left it was around 10 so there was still time to kill so we walked over to the Chicago Triathlon to see participants finish (yes, I recognize the irony of topping off Oreo pancakes with watching a triathlon). I still underestimate how long it takes to walk places in the city so by the time we left (10:30), I feared we would be cutting it close. A late subway train and a side trip to the bathroom made us close to 15 minutes late. I really hate being late so I wasn’t in the best of moods as we were about to enter the sanctuary. To make matters worse, it was a pretty full sanctuary so the only place for us was in the first first pew in front of the pulpit. I always wondered by people had a problem with sitting in the very front so I now know, especially if you have kids (our 4-year-old let out a couple not-so-subtle yawns during the sermon). What it made it hospitable, though, was the kindness of the usher. He didn’t seem to think it was a big deal that we were late. He looked high and low for a place for us to sit together and kindly escorted us to the front, as discretely as he could. He came back a couple minutes later with activity bags for the kids, even though we had already picked one up.
The business world might call that great customer service. Christians call it hospitality and it transformed my heart, enabling me to give thanks and praise a God who deserves my worship.