Fellowship history · The Vons parking lot

The Saturday-morning lot where the whole format was born.

People ask us, kindly, why a Christian rock band would choose to worship in parking lots, as though it were a gimmick we cooked up, and the honest answer is that we did not choose it at all — it chose us, on a Saturday morning, in the parking lot of the North Hills Vons, and we have been doing it ever since because it turned out to be true. This is the earliest regular thing we ever did as a fellowship, earlier than the albums had titles, earlier than we thought of ourselves as having a schedule. It began because Vons was the grocery store we shopped at anyway. A few of us were there Saturday mornings for the same reason everyone is — bread, milk, the sale on paper towels — and one week Sister Petra had her bass in the trunk because she had come straight from a Friday practice, and Brother Wesley wandered over, and Pastor Connie was three cars down loading her cart, and before any of us had decided a thing, we were singing between the cars with the tailgate down, quiet, the way you sing when you are not sure you are allowed. Nobody had booked us. Nobody had set out a single folding chair. And that, we have come to believe, is exactly why it worked. We came back the next Saturday on purpose, and the one after that, and somewhere in there it stopped being an accident and started being the format — the whole unhurried business of parking-lot worship that the ministry still runs on to this day. We did not invent it. We just kept showing up to the lot until it had a shape, and the shape it took was: come early, sing low, feed whoever's there, and leave the spaces you borrowed the way you found them. Everything else we do is a footnote to that Vons.

• ✚The cart corral was the first stage — There was no platform, of course; there never was in those years. There was the steel shopping-cart corral out past the handicap spaces, and we learned that if you set up beside it the corral threw the sound back gently and gave the singers something to stand near, the way a choir stands near a rail. Brother Jim — years before the kit, when he was just a man who came to carry things — would wheel the loose carts home to the corral before we started, partly to tidy the lot and partly because the sound was better once they were nested. We have played grander rooms since and missed that corral in every one of them.
• ✚The early risers were the whole congregation — Saturday-morning grocery people are a particular flock: the widowers who shop at seven because the store is quiet, the young parents with a cart full and a toddler who has been awake since five, the man in the reflective vest just off a night shift. Nobody there had dressed for church and nobody was asked to. They were simply the people the morning had already gathered, and we came to see that a congregation you did not summon — one that was only passing through with a gallon of milk — is about the truest congregation there is. You do not have to fill a room. You have only to sing kindly in one that is already full.
• ✚The worship was over before we announced it — Here is the discovery that made the format, and it happened at that Vons before it happened anywhere: the truest worship kept arriving in the unhurried minutes before anyone believed it had begun — while Sister Petra was still tuning against the hum of the ice machine and Wesley was still finding the key and an old woman had stopped her cart to listen without either of us noticing. By the time we thought to call it a service, the service was mostly behind us. We stopped trying to schedule the moment worship starts somewhere around our fourth Saturday, having failed at it four times, and we have never scheduled it since. We only make sure to be tuned and ready before we think we need to be, because the Spirit, in our experience, does not wait for the downbeat.
• ✚Come back next Saturday, and the one after — A thing you do once is a story; a thing you do every Saturday is a format. What turned that first happy accident into the ministry we still run was the plain, unglamorous decision to come back — same lot, same hour, whether four people gathered or forty, whether we felt like it or not. Regularity is nine-tenths of a calling. The casseroles came later, and the second minivan trip for the chairs, and the sign-up clipboard, but the spine of the whole thing was set that second Saturday, when we returned on purpose to a parking lot that had asked us for nothing.
• ✚Borrow the lot; leave it kinder — It was never our parking lot, and we did not forget it. We kept the volume under the cart-return clatter and the store's own overhead music, we never once blocked a space a shopper needed, we asked the manager's blessing the third week and were given it, and when we finished we ran the loose carts back to the corral and picked up whatever the morning had dropped, so the lot was a shade tidier for our having sung in it. Every rule we still keep about playing a borrowed room — the hospital lobby, the tire store, the campground — we first kept, without naming it, on the asphalt at that Vons.

The oldest regular thing we ever did, and the reason there is a folding chair in the trunk at all. Fellowship in song since 2007. Find a lot that will have you, come early, sing low, and leave it kinder than you found it.