They're not going to be able to come

MTW hosts a global missions conference biannually (that's every other year, for those of you that get confused) that takes place in Atlanta during a weekend in November. It's a pretty fargin' big deal. So big in fact that each MTW employee is assigned a group of churches to call that are affiliated with our denomination to personally invite folks to come.

None of us, I believe, really like making the calls, although obviously we believe in the conference and all that.

This year I had to call about thirty churches that were all located in Pennsylvania except for a random two that were in Maryland. The deadline to make the calls in next Friday, so not wanting to procrastinate to the max, I started making them today. Plus my boss sort of asked us in our meeting last Tuesday how the calls were going and I was the only one who hadn't started. Yeah, it's time.

So by 9:30am I was strolling along through my list and having some good conversations I might add with missions pastors, etc. I hit a slight bump in the road around 11:45 after I called the first of my two Maryland churches.

Once I got off the phone with the first one I realized that the second one had the same phone number as the first, but with the church attendance size listed as "0". I thought, hmmm, it's probably a new church plant affiliated with the first, and doesn't have a lot of regular attendees yet. I decided to call the first church back and ask. Here's how the conversation went:

"Faith Presbyterian Church" ~receptionist says.

~my time to shine. "Hi, this is Jessica again calling from MTW. Listen, I have a question. The next church on my list to call is listed as WIC Presbyterian and it has the same phone number as your church. Is it like a new church-plant or something?"

"Well, that church is affiliated with ours and we helped start it, but it's actually in a prison."

"A prison?"

"Yeah. We have a night worship service over there and members of our church attend and reach out to the inmates. It's grown into an actual church of it's own now."

"Wow. That's really cool."

"Yeah, it's been a really neat ministry."

"Hmmm...so....I'm guessing those folks are not going to be able to come to the MTW missions conference."

Cough/laughter. "No, probably not."

"Right. Ok, thanks!"