The spooky setting of a dim, dank church basement. (Photo by Ifeoluwa B. on Unsplash)
Author's Note: This piece belongs to that peculiar American genre in which the most gothic architecture one encounters is a fellowship hall with bad lighting and strong coffee. I have sat through my share of these ecclesiastical inquests, and can testify without exaggeration that no haunted asylum nor lunatic crypt produces dread equal to a church committee meeting in which everyone has brought notes.
That being said, any resemblance to actual persons living or deceased in this story is coincidental. Maybe.
When I was a young preacher with more earnestness than sense, I learned there were two kinds of church meetings: the ones you leave thinking you might have been saved, and the ones you leave thinking you might have been summoned. This was the latter.
They called me to come down to the end of the hallway that smelled like old hymnals and lemon oil, into a Sunday-school room that had not seen natural sunlight since the Nixon administration. The committee sat like a jury of very slow, judgmental crickets. They had their folders open. “Come in, preacher,” they said, in unison, which is the church-meeting equivalent of, “We have no news from the warden. The execution will proceed as planned.”
In the corner, a woman, her face partially in shadow, leaned forward and whispered, “Youth.”
She spoke with a pirate inflection, which is the sort of theological detail I had come to expect from church committees. “The youth,” she said, “they be coming no more.” She tapped her notes, which were, I later learned, index cards on which she had written: YOUTH = MISSING, POSS. EATEN?
“Aye,” the rest agreed, which is what committees do when they want to appear both solemn and dramatic without actually having to do anything risky, like vote.
“Where have they gone?” asked a man who had once been an usher and who now seemed to live in a perpetual state of scanning for spilled coffee.
“I cannot summon what does not exist,” I said. I am nothing if not honest in the face of ecclesiastical hysteria. “They have gone to fight in the Oyster Wars.”
Silence. “Explain,” said the woman in the shadows, because the committee always asks the kind of question that requires a PowerPoint.
So I did. I told them that the youth, those creatures who once sat in the pews practicing amens like a warm-up exercise, had been lured away by something awful and modern: smartphones with siren songs, playlists longer than Sunday, and tournaments in small marine gastronomy. They had become militant about mollusks. They added oysters to their profiles and formed brigades called The Shellshockers. I believed this was true because when you are a preacher and you make something up in a meeting, it very often becomes true.
“That is not good enough,” the pirate-faced woman said. “Make them appear, or pay the devil’s due.” She used the phrase “devil’s due” like a budget line item.
So to the lab I went. It wasn’t a lab in the scientific sense, unless you count the church kitchen as a research facility for casseroles and moral decisions. I borrowed paperclips for staples, felt for soul, a half-used VBS craft kit, two glow sticks, three foam fingers that said #1, and a very confused Bible study leader named Captain Carl, who still clung to his comb-over like a flag.
I told Carl bluntly we were making a Franken–Youth. We would stitch together everything the youth had ever liked and hope the stitch job would hold.
From the youth director, we gathered raw, unrefined enthusiasm and a box of wristbands that faintly smelled of rubber and regret. From the praise band, we took not a complete rhythm but a steady thump that could be felt in the base of the skull, symbolizing the heartbeat of something young. From middle school Sunday school, we rescued an awkward icebreaker called 'Two Truths and a Lie,' which we stitched in like a patch.
We sewed in TikTok choreography, the committee insisted on a slightly more modest version, and grafted on an appetite for nachos, because if you want attendance numbers, you must offer cheese. Carl insisted we give it a mission statement: Be honest, be kind, make nachos. We stapled a copy to its chest.
At midnight, we marched the Franken–Youth into the sanctuary. The committee gathered at the front like undertakers watching a miracle. The organist played three notes that sounded suspiciously like Kumbaya if you kept one ear in the present and another ear in the thrift store.
Slowly, as if powered by a playlist and a devotional app, they rose. They shuffled. They did not look like the kids I remembered. They were a collage: one wore a hoodie whose slogan read SOMETIMES I AM A MYSTERY, another had a shell necklace from the Oyster Wars, one clutched a foam finger in each hand and chewed on a glow stick as one chews the end of a pencil in existential boredom.
Then, terribly and beautifully, they sang. Not Kumbaya exactly, not quite, and with a verse that went, “Kum… ba… yah, I will be see yah later for the chop in the cauldron,” which is how choruses disintegrate into folklore when passed through adolescent mouths.
The committee sat in stunned silence, their attendance charts forgotten. The pirate woman blinked as if to reveal she had known all along the sea could return what was lost, provided you had the right hybrid of nacho cheese and sermon.
“We succeeded?” Carl whispered, hopeful as a man who has just discovered beer.
“Yes,” I said. “Sort of. We brought them back. But they bring their oysters. And their glow sticks. And their happy clappy clapp-alongs. Also, they are unionizing the potluck.”
We had a youth group now, round and squirming and slightly damp with the Atlantic breeze of whatever coastal fantasy they had joined. They were earnest in the way only teenagers can be sincere, utterly convinced of their own mythos and slightly allergic to sitting for more than thirteen minutes at a time.
The committee filed out of the room with the gravity of people who had seen something and were not sure if it was a sin or a revival. The pirate lady paused by the door.
“You done good, preacher,” she said, her voice softer now, like a hymn sung in a thunderstorm. “But next time, make them less into oysters.”
“Madam,” I replied, “I make no promises about mollusks. I only bargain in souls and social media engagement.”
She laughed in a way that sounded like someone who had once eaten an oyster and regretted it immediately. The committee dispersed into the dark hallway.
As for the Franken–Youth, they stayed. They started a band. They brewed a modest interest in theology, mostly in the form of memes. They rolled up to Sunday school with glow sticks and a mission: to be present, to be noticed, to be fed, and, for reasons I will never fully understand, to debate the ethics of the Oyster Wars between verses of a contemporary hymn.
Attendance was up. The potluck was complicated. The Lord works in mysterious ways, I told myself. Sometimes God works through casseroles. Sometimes God works through committees. Sometimes, the Lord works through a lab made out of felt and foam fingers. Sometimes, the Good Lord works by letting you stitch together a congregation out of all the things modernity loves, and then hoping the stitches hold through the next storm.
Richard Bryant
Richard Bryant has spent enough hours in church basements and meeting rooms to qualify as a field anthropologist of American religion. He writes about language, belief, culture, and the comic spectacle of ordinary life when people try to take themselves seriously.