Because I was the only one in the church office at the time, I took the phone call from the good folks who sold us our photocopy machine five years ago.
The caller wanted me to look at the little dials that tell how many copies we have made. Our monthly service contract fee is based on our usage.
Afterward, I sat back and thought about it. In five years we have made nearly 750,000 copies. Three-quarters of a million! I got out my paper and pencil and went to work.
We use a lot of legal-sized paper for bulletins and so forth. Figure that half of the 750,000 went into legal-sized copies, half into letter-sized. That totals nearly 148 miles of paper.
Try to picture that. Think of the distance between your home and a favorite place 150 miles away. If you think in biblical terms, picture the distance between Jerusalem and Damascus. If you are a long-distance runner, picture six marathons, back-to-back.
The number stuck in my mind. I was so obsessed that I began researching exactly how we “spent” those 150 miles of photocopies. Here’s my report:
The first 125 miles turned out to be pretty routine. Bulletins. Newsletters. Annual reports. Minutes. Financial reports.
I sometimes suspect these items are interchangeable. You could send me a year’s worth of yours, and I could send you a year’s worth of mine, and if we would change a few names, dates, and addresses, no one would know the difference.
For example, if you are producing the January newsletter, you are reminding a few sluggards to pick up their offering envelopes from the tables in the narthex. You are thanking people for their Christmas generosity. You are reporting that there are still a few Sundays available for donating altar flowers-see the flower chart or call the church office. You are listing the circle meetings and the pre-Lenten study program and the youth ski trip/sledding party/sleigh ride (unless you happen to live in some warm part of the country).
Our first 125 miles of paper would be remarkably similar to yours.
But we’re just getting to the good stuff. The last twenty-five miles are the most interesting.
One mile of body parts. Yes, Junior, the copy machine will make a copy of your handprint. Your elbow. Your foot. Your ear. Other things, too, but since this is a church office, we do not copy those.
Two miles of Christmas pageants. Only the teachers care about the script. Everybody knows the best parts of the pageant aren’t in the script, such as when the Cabbage Patch Kid who is assigned the role of the baby Jesus gets dropped and rolls down the chancel stairs, and Mary and Joseph get in a fight over who did the dropping and who will do the picking up.
Ten miles of personal work. “I was just in the neighborhood and thought I’d stop by the church to pray. Oh, there’s a copy machine here? I didn’t know that. Do you suppose I could make fifteen or twenty copies of Aunt Verna’s recipe for fruitcake? Everybody loves Aunt Verna’s fruitcake.”
Five miles of pure waste. Trial runs. Paper the wrong size. Machine needs fluid. Repairman testing his work.
One mile of music. Of course we know it is strictly illegal to copy music on a copy machine, so we never do this. At least, not very often. Only when we really need it. Or we have the copies but they’re torn. Or it would take too long for new copies to get here.
Three miles of pictures from coloring books. Now and then Sunday school teachers get desperate.
Three miles of miscellaneous. Sermon copies. Memos. Lesson plans. Letters. Christmas letters. Cartoons. Diagrams of football plays. You name it, we got it.
Well, that’s how we spent our 150 miles of paper. A lot of trees sacrificed their lives to keep this place going.
Of course, we do not put much faith in the power of the paper we produce. Not many lives are changed by newsletters or church bulletins or financial reports or pastoral letters or annual reports or committee statements or convention studies. A few, maybe, but not many.
Yet most of us find it’s much easier to deal with paper than people. It’s tempting to allow our ministry to revolve around what can be photocopied.
But we also know that people are what ministry is all about. People with fruitcake recipes, body parts, and a deep, often unspoken need for God’s grace.
When God sought to get his message through to us, he didn’t dictate a pastoral letter and run it off on the heavenly Xerox. God sent Jesus Christ. Just one copy.
There’s a lesson in there somewhere.
Steven L. McKinley is pastor of Grace Lutheran Church in Anoka, Minnesota.
Copyright © 1991 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
