FINALLY A GOOD USE FOR CHURCH PEWS

From the last entry in my blog you know I am a foodie. I love to cook, I love to read about cooking and I love to watch others cook. I recently found a restaurant that makes a dish that brings back old childhood memories. I grew up on pasties. Pasties basically consist of pie type dough filled with things like meat and potatoes and some root vegetables. My mom grew up in Butte Montana where pasties are famous as the food that miners took into the mines with them. They kept well and they tasted good. My mom made them all the time when I was growing up. I thought everyone ate them so I was surprised after I left home that nobody seemed to know what a pasty was. Therefore I have always longed for pasties. I have even learned how to make them myself. When I found out that there was an authentic pasty place in Mesa well I had to go. I was not disappointed. They have taken the basic pasty and have found ways to come up with a variety of different favored ones.
I love this new place called The Pasty Company for a number of reasons. First it makes great pasties. They have the basic Oggie which is steak and potatoes, onions and root vegetables. I personally like the Lamb and mint which has lamb, potatoes, rutabaga, onion and fresh mint with a side of wine gravy. They also have Bangers and Mash. Secondly it reminds me of many of the pubs I spent time in when I lived in England. You can get Strongbow Cider, Franziskaner Hefe and even Oak Creek Nut Brown Ale from Sedona. Thirdly, well it has spunk, a little bit of rebelliousness with a tongue in cheek attitude about it. For instance since the owners are from Northern England you can get Car Bombs as a drink for 3$ or Skull Splitter Ale. Not to mention that happy hour is from 3 to 6 and 10 to close everyday and its happy hour all day on Sunday. How can you beat that? I have joked to my wife though that if we are going to keep coming here we are both going to have to get tattoos and some nose piercings to fit in better. The entire staff looks to all be in their twenties. They are all tattooed, pierced and have various shades of hair coloring and at first glance a hardness to them. You soon discover though that they are also very cheerful and warm to their customers. But there is an edge here and it is in the customers as well who are an assortment of people, many looking just like the staff, and still others from various walks of society, but there are no suits here, no ties. If you’re going to come here you better leave that at home. I love this place so much that I thought about writing Guy Fieri about it so that maybe he could come out with his Diner, Drive-Ins and Dives team and do a show on them. But then I realized this is not a Guy Fieri place. In fact if Guy were to walk through the door with his phony spiked white hair and sunglasses and over the top attitude he would soon be grabbed by the ear and shown out the other door and told to get lost. And it probably wouldn’t be the male six-four bartender doing the honors but the close to six foot female waitress wearing a t-shirt with some band’s name on it that no one over thirty has ever heard of. No this isn’t Guy’s place; no this is the land of Anthony Bourdain of No Reservations fame. Anthony would be loved here, he would be invited into the kitchen here, this is his type of place from the tattooed waitress to the Church pews for seating.
Yeah that’s right I said church pews for seating. The first time my wife pointed that to me I responded well finally someone has found a good use for church pews. Anyone who has spent anytime around me knows I hate church pews, at least in churches. I have led worship in a multipurpose room that looks nothing like a church for eleven years now and have enjoyed it. I am not a fan of the traditional church building. I figure why spend money on something you are only going to use a few hours on Sunday when you can spend money building something you will use all week. I really don’t have a good reason for my disdain, except well, other people’s attachment to these things. I grew up in a traditional church setting and I like most things about the traditions of the church. They provide stability and they keep things constant. The traditions also carry with them good practices that have endured hundreds even thousands of years now. I like things like times of prayer and good order and flow in the worship service. I am not against tradition in the least. I guess you could say I just have a problem with furniture. Well it is more than that. I have a problem with any tradition that has outlived its usefulness but people still keep demanding that it be kept because, well that is the way we have always done it. I have found that most church people have no idea for instance why we have pews, why we have flowers on the altar, why we have altar rails, why we have stained glass, why we have altars, or eternal lights. They could not tell you why those things exist, but if you tried taking them away they would throw a fit because it would be change.
Maybe that is why I like the Pasty Company, they are very traditional and yet living outside the box. Notice I didn’t say thinking. They are not just thinking outside the box, they are living outside the box. There is a big difference. They are making the traditional pasty and serving traditional English food, but they are doing it their way. They have invented new recipes; they have challenged the status quo. Most of all they are having fun serving food that I remember when I was kid. It’s a taste of my childhood with a twist. Jesus himself was a bit of an Anthony Bourdain. He spent a lot of time hanging out with the Pasty Company crowd and he loved them, and they loved him. Jesus was not concerned about furniture or a steeple, he was concerned about people. I think he would laughed at the church pews as well. Jesus isn’t concerned about what you are sitting on when he is talking as long as you are listening. Jesus interestingly enough provided meals many times with his preaching, and did much of teaching between bites as he was eating with the people. Maybe we should build a restaurant like the Pasty Company to have Church services in, but then I would want to get rid of the church pews.

Pastor Fred