By Thaddeus Mulvane, Statistics and Head-Count Correspondent

LOWER BRISTOW — The wooden report board hanging beside the pulpit at Cedar Bend Community Chapel has four slots: Attendance Last Sunday, Attendance Today, Offering and Record Attendance. Three of them change every week. The fourth has read "214" since June 7, 1987.

That was the Sunday a thunderstorm washed out the church league softball doubleheader across the road, and both teams, still in uniform, came in to wait it out. Head usher at the time, Roscoe Delahunt, counted them twice to be sure. "Thirty-one men in cleats," Delahunt, now 81, recalled. "Plus their wives, who had brought the coolers. The organist played the postlude three times because nobody could leave until the lightning stopped."

The church has averaged about 90 people on a Sunday since. It has never come within 60 of the record.

The Record Attendance Committee was formed that August with a single goal. It has met on the second Tuesday of every month for 39 years, according to minutes kept in a green three-ring binder that committee chair Lorna Fesperman described as "about three inches thick and none of it good news."

Strategies over the years have included a "Bring a Neighbor Sunday" (1991, attendance 133), a "Bring Two Neighbors Sunday" (1992, 128, because "people had already brought their one neighbor"), a barbecue lunch announced from the pulpit for six weeks straight (2004, 171) and a 2015 proposal to schedule the church league doubleheader across the road again and simply wait for weather. That last idea is still listed in the minutes as "tabled pending forecast."

Fesperman said the committee has been offered an easy way out more than once. A visiting youth pastor suggested in 2012 that the board could simply be reset to show a "modern era record." The committee voted against it 5 to 0. "The board does not have an asterisk card," Fesperman said. "We checked."

Not every member is eager to see the number fall. Delahunt, who still ushers the center aisle, admitted he "would not be heartbroken" if 214 lasted another 39 years. "I counted that crowd," he said. "Every one of those boys had mud on his socks. That number was earned."

Cedar Bend's current ushers say they now count every Sunday with "extra care" and with two clickers, one in each hand, in case a record day sneaks up on them. Last Easter reached 186, which set off a brief rumor in the narthex that the record had fallen. The rumor was traced to an usher who had accidentally clicked both counters for the same family.

The committee's newest plan, approved at Tuesday's meeting, is a fall Homecoming Sunday with a potluck, a gospel quartet and a "former members welcome back" mailing sent to every address in the 1987 photo directory. Fesperman said 41 of those letters have already come back stamped "return to sender," and she has filed them in the green binder.

At press time, the committee had also quietly asked the church league to keep its schedule open for the second Sunday of June, "just in case."