It was a bright Sunday morning — or at least as bright as it gets before coffee — when I arrived at the church to discover that the bulletins had gone missing. Not misplaced. Not accidentally printed in the wrong colour. Missing. Gone. Vanished into the great ecclesiastical abyss where paperclips, birettas, and half the parish’s teaspoons go to die.
I looked in the sacristy, the parish office, the rector’s study, and even (with some hope and not a little fear) behind the altar frontal. Nothing. I was about to call the police — or worse, the archdeacon — when the verger appeared, looking suspiciously calm.
“Oh,” he said, “I moved them to keep them safe.”
“Safe from what?” I asked.
He looked around solemnly. “From people taking them.”
It was at that moment I realized that Anglican life is, in many ways, a living parable. We are constantly trying to keep something safe — our bulletins, our pews, our hymns, our committee minutes — only to discover that, in doing so, we’ve hidden them from the very people who needed them.
The Lost and the Found (and the Misfiled)
Jesus once told a story about a woman who lost a coin and swept the house until she found it. If He’d been speaking in an Anglican parish, I suspect it would have been about a lost key to the vesting cupboard, or perhaps the missing wireless microphone that last worked during the Mulroney administration.
But the point, then and now, remains: what is lost matters to God. Whether it’s a coin, a sheep, or a sense of purpose. And perhaps, just perhaps, the Church’s call in every generation is to be in the ministry of finding — finding faith, finding hope, finding each other again after long absences, and sometimes even finding the bulletins five minutes before the opening hymn.
Holy Chaos and Divine Order
Of course, God has a remarkable sense of humour when it comes to order and chaos. St. Paul tells the Corinthians that “all things should be done decently and in order.” Wise words. But then you look at a parish potluck and realize that God’s version of order must be far more forgiving than ours.
The truth is, the Kingdom of God probably looks a lot less like a well-filed vestry minute book and a lot more like that potluck table — a bit untidy, some dishes you can’t identify, but everyone somehow fed.
Grace in the Mess
I sometimes wonder if the Church’s greatest strength isn’t its ability to get things right, but its refusal to give up when things go wrong. We forget the offering plates, we mix up the hymn numbers, we discover mid-sermon that the microphone has died — and yet somehow, in the midst of it all, grace happens.
Because grace, unlike bulletins, doesn’t get lost. It finds us — precisely in the places we thought we’d hidden our failures.
Epilogue: The Return of the Bulletins
For the record, the bulletins were eventually found — locked in the janitor’s closet, beside the mop bucket and an unsettling number of unclaimed umbrellas. When I held one in my hand, I felt oddly triumphant, as though I’d just discovered the Dead Sea Scrolls (only with more typos).
I looked at the verger and said, “You see, nothing is truly lost in the Church.”
He nodded, entirely serious. “Except the stapler,” he said.
And so, we press on — finding, losing, laughing, and trusting that even when our order falters and our bulletins vanish, God’s grace remains beautifully, stubbornly, unlosable.
A Prayer for the Misplaced, the Missing, and the Muddled
Gracious God,
You who leave the ninety-nine to find the one, look kindly upon all that has gone astray in our midst — our bulletins, our good intentions, and our sense of direction.
When we misplace what matters, teach us to seek with patience rather than panic, and to laugh gently at our own disarray.
Remind us that nothing truly precious is ever lost in You — not the souls we love, not the hopes we’ve buried under busyness, not even the faith that sometimes feels misfiled.
Restore to us the joy of finding, the peace of letting go, and the quiet assurance that grace is never where we expect it, but always where we need it.
Through Jesus Christ, Finder of the lost, and Friend of the slightly disorganized.
Amen.