A Story with a Happy Ending

Have you ever wondered what happened to those special personal items you’ve donated or sold to some happy new owner?  Well, John Hargrove has such a story to share with us...a church story with a happy ending. John writes:

In early 2016, Pastor Mark began working with both the Church Council and the Worship & Music Committee on a dramatic change he envisioned for the St. Mark sanctuary.  The proposal was to remove all of the oak church pews and replace them with rows of upholstered chairs.  The rationale for the change was to both provide worshipers with more comfortable seating and give St. Mark more flexibility in arranging seating in the sanctuary for different services and events.

By the summer of 2016, new chairs had been ordered, and I was asked to find a new home for our pews.  Believe it or not, there are multiple websites selling used church pews, and we were one of hundreds of churches around the country peddling their pews.  After we moved the pews out of St. Mark to an empty building for storage, I received a call from a person representing his Mennonite congregation in southern Wisconsin.  I met these wonderful gentlemen (yes, they all wore great hats) so they could inspect the pews.  They were impressed by the quality of the pews and all the different sizes.

The congregation bought the pews and moved them to storage as they built a new worship building to accommodate the sizes of our pews. I received a phone call this past weekend from the gentleman I worked with. He wanted me to know the pews were moving to the now completed building, and that their first service in the new space would occur by the end of this month.

After serving St. Mark so well for several decades, our pews will again serve a new group of worshipers.  Thanks be to God!

John Hargrove

Worship & Music Committee