General Assembly Doors

by Dee H. Wade

General Assembly doors,
especially rented, oh so conventional,
    convention center doors,
are high on function and low on form, and
    necessarily so,
because if you are the General Assembly you
    can’t waste time on art.
You’ve got things to do: documents to read
    and motions to perfect and
sessions to attend and conversations to have
    and decisions to make and
thoughtfulness to enter and prayer to practice
    and Spirit to follow and rest to take,
so doors should act like doors and not like
metaphors,
snarling traffic flow while folk ponder deep, symbolic allusions
pressed into their surface and suggested by their shape.

Functional church doors don’t suggest, they signify,
speaking the common sense language of fire codes.
Well lit, and swinging the way you need to go,
they let you out faster than they let you in.
Which might be the entire point if you are a General Assembly.
You want to go in to do the business that only you can do,
sending missionaries, setting policies, selecting leadership, and the like,
and while you’re at it, enjoying the company as much as you can,
but then you want to get out of there and go home, where the real work waits
and the Gospel can incite some serious good.

Functional church doors that mean by doing
are needed at every stop, even the congregational one,
signifying that Jesus has saved already, and that the world can relax:
in Christ all has been reconciled to God, so you be reconciled too.
One by one, through pretty or massive or ornate doors we enter to worship,
to honor the One who has made us, and not we ourselves,
into community, a membership, a people connected,
who love and know, feel and hope, but we don’t make our love the center,
but God’s, and we don’t want to keep it to ourselves, this love,
so as one we crash through the exits, dispersed, but a body still, outward sent.

Photo by Jane Hines

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