Women's Day and Other Disasters

Pastor Vaughn announced that this year, the women of Greater Promise would not be doing any work.

Every woman in the building understood immediately that this was a trap.

The theme is Rest for the Women Who Carry the House. The plan is simple: on the second Sunday in May, the men will greet, usher, cook, serve, and clean, and the women will sit down. The men have a schedule. The men have matching ties. The men have a deacon who checks the chicken at four in the morning and calls it leadership.

Marva Green has been a member of Greater Promise First Missionary Apostolic Evangelical Baptist Church of God and Christ for two months, which in a church with twelve permanent members is long enough to be handed a folder. She is the church writer, a county deed clerk, and the only person present taking notes on the slow collapse of a program nobody is allowed to help with.

Because the women cannot touch it, everything the women usually handle goes wrong at once. A budget gets approved by faith. A guest speaker with eighty-six thousand followers and twenty-one years of unfinished business with the pastor may or may not be coming. A lavender suit meets a Saturday it cannot survive. Forty-eight pounds of chicken go missing between a locked pantry and a Sunday morning. And Pastor Alberta Vaughn, who has told everybody to rest, goes down on the floor of a beauty-supply store because she has never once taken her own instruction.

By the time one hundred and forty-three women are in the building and the ovens quit, Greater Promise has to answer the question underneath the whole thing - whether the women of that church are being honored, or just being let out for the afternoon.

Funny about church the way only somebody raised in one can be funny about church, and serious about what it costs the women who keep the doors open. The saints are ridiculous. The faith is not the joke.

The Saints of Greater Promise, Book Two. Begins with Friends, Family & Foolishness.