Hi, I'm Warren and I do the bulletin. Just get me the info by Tuesday and I'll figure it out.

Ninety-one years old, twenty-three years at the same church, every week on WordPerfect, yes that WordPerfect. He was wonderful. He was also, statistically, not going to be doing it forever.

With twenty-five years in ministry and as ordained mainline clergy, Melanie has heard versions of Warren over and over. Warrens are everywhere. A volunteer who has been holding the whole operation together for longer than anyone could remember, and who is about to retire or burn out or just gently age out of the work. Or that fear-inducing day when the secretary quits and no one knows how to do any of it, and can we really afford to hire someone else anyway?

Leah looked up from her phone. Mom. You know I do this for a living.

Ella, who has organized every family event since she was fourteen, asked whether any of these churches had anything resembling a unified worship planner. None of them did. She sketched one before dessert.

Mila, who has spent her entire adult life on the internet in ways her mother does not fully understand, pulled up three small-church Facebook pages and made everyone look. Two of them still said Happy Easter. It was August.

Brian, our resident artistic IT nerd, looked at the bulletins they'd been pulling up all night and said, I think we can help.

By the end of that dinner, the shape of Church Office to Go was drawn on the back of a Target receipt. The problem wasn't one church, or one Warren. It was every small mainline church Melanie had ever known.