Dirty Secrets: My First Job Ever as a Church Janitor

Sometimes serving God means scrubbing shit off the walls of His house

The first real job I ever had was as a janitor at church. I started out as a teenager and worked there part-time for about three years. It was a great job overall, but it was also kind of a weird experience.

While cleaning up after people, I learned about human nature, what it’s like working for Christian ministries, and how sometimes things aren’t exactly as they seem.

Getting the job was initially very disappointing

When I first applied for the job, I didn’t get it. They told me they decided to hire a woman instead “because women are better at cleaning than men.” No joke.

I was angry and insulted, and I knew this was sex discrimination that was probably illegal, but I felt I couldn’t do anything about it. About a week later, the woman they hired quit, so they called me up.

“Are you still interested?” they asked. I said yes, but the entire time I worked there, I never forgot that I wasn’t their first choice.

Sometimes, churches are hiding dirty secrets

I heard an astonishing amount of gossip from church employees and volunteers while I was lurking in the background, quietly cleaning. There was a LOT of petty back-stabbing, weird loyalties and alliances among the staff that I tried hard not to get involved in.

One of the pastors didn’t like one of the janitors I worked with, and he did not hide his disdain. I felt obligated to “take my friend’s side” on everything, which I found childish and exhausting. It was an open secret, and everybody just knew they hated each other.

Some secrets were far darker and more hidden, however.

One day, I found pornography on one of the pastors’ computers. I was clicking around on his computer when I found a folder filled with images of naked women with ginormous breasts who were very obviously not his wife.

I was so utterly shocked by what I saw that I logged out, left the room shaking in fright, and never said a word to anybody about it.

I still feel conflicted about that to this day. I wish I had told someone.

As a janitor, of course, I had no business even touching his computer, but I was a young, dumb teen, and while cleaning his desk, I got distracted and wanted to see how different his computer was from the one my family had.

Did it have any games on it? How big was the hard drive? What kind of graphics card did it use? Did he have an MP3 player? I was a big tech nerd and wanted to see what it was capable of.

I might have been fired for snooping around on his computer. I know that, of course.

But the pastor definitely should have been fired for hiding porn on it, or at least disciplined… this was a church computer, on church property, for Pete’s sake.

After I left the church, I was horrified to learn that one of the pastors I knew and had worked with was physically abusive. There were credible allegations that he was a child abuser, and one staff member told me he had punched another pastor so hard in the stomach it knocked him to the ground.

I knew nothing about any of this when I worked there. But if I had found out, I wonder how I might have reacted because, again, there was clearly a culture of secrecy, and I might have feared for my job or perhaps even my parents getting somehow kicked out of the church or excommunicated.

Are these rational thoughts? Who knows?! When you’re a teenager, you don’t know what to think. You’re just a kid trying to live your life: pornography, abuse, and violence by “older, wiser” people you trust is almost too hard to comprehend.

The fact that all of this was somehow never made public, even to this day, as far as I know, is absolutely scandalous. I’ve since found out that the abusive pastor is now dead, and it’s a shame that he went to his grave with many secrets that will never be made public this side of eternity.

I think this is part of why, as an adult, I’m so adamantly opposed to keeping secrets or glossing over the ugly side of humanity. I can’t stand the hypocrisy of nicely dressed people in suits smiling on Sunday and sinning on Monday without any reconciliation, punishment, or accountability enforced by a higher power.

If I had worked at Arby’s, for example, and found pornography on the boss’s computer where I clocked in in the back room, that would be bad. But it wouldn’t be as bad, and I wouldn’t be so surprised. But at church? Really?

• What other secrets were the church leaders hiding from us?

• What else might I have uncovered if I had dug deeper?

• Why were the men who were telling us teenagers not to have sex because fornication was a sin secretly hiding their own sin of adultery of the heart?

• Were any of these men actually committing adultery outright?

• How could an abusive man who physically beat his coworkers call himself “Pastor?”

• Why did everybody who knew about this remain silent? Did anybody know about it?

Had I failed as a church employee for not uncovering any of this? Was it a moral failure for me as a Christian? I still ponder these questions to this day.

One thing I think it did help me with was later in life, when I discovered that someone I knew was being sexually abused, I immediately contacted authority figures and demanded that law enforcement get involved. This time around, there would be no pondering. I would not be silent.

I demanded—loudly and unpopularly—that we contact the police and get an attorney involved, which we eventually did. But I was shocked at how slowly and quietly everybody else wanted to proceed. They all seemed to just want the revelations of sexual crime to “go away” quietly and not tarnish anybody’s reputation.

I will never stand for that.

Looking back on all this now, I guess you could say that janitors know how to uncover dirt wherever they look. The problem, though, at the church, in this case, I found a mess but didn’t know how to clean it up. So, figuratively speaking, I closed the door and walked away, hoping someone else would find it instead and know how to clean it.

People asked me weird questions

Sometimes, random people would come in off the street and ask for money. I guess they figured since we were a church, we would just give them cash. I don’t know that we ever did, but if they asked, I’d refer them to the office and tell them the decision was ultimately with the deacons.

Once, a man came in randomly and asked if we could help him buy flowers for his dying mother. We put him in touch with the church office, and I think they actually did give him money, even though I was fairly sure he was lying.

The question I got asked most often was bizarre: “How much do you get paid?”

To the considerable annoyance of some people, I never answered this question. I found it inappropriate and intrusive. I never could figure out why people cared so much.

“Well enough” was the only thing I said in response, but some people (usually other teens) would still keep pushing. “How much is ‘well enough?’” They wondered.

Weirdos.

The building was already pretty clean, with some gross exceptions

Churches are generally a pretty tame place since they’re basically private businesses with strict hours and controlled access. Plus, our building was brand new, so overall, it never got that dirty, and I was thankful for that.

Even in our quiet building, though, sometimes people would smear poop on the bathroom walls.

I still cannot understand why anybody would do this, but they did. (I can’t imagine what being a janitor would be like in a public place like a bus stop where anybody and everybody can come and go 24/7. Yuck!)

On my first day on the job, I was told about the number one most important rule I had to abide by—I would be fired immediately, on the spot, if I were ever caught breaking it: I had to wear gloves anytime I cleaned the bathrooms. I was obviously 100% okay with this: I cannot imagine someone choosing to use their bare hands to clean toilets.

Being a teenage boy was incredibly awkward in the beginning

Walking into a ladies’ bathroom for the first time in my life as a 15-year-old boy felt like the naughtiest thing I had ever done. It was also extremely awkward and… sizzling with sensuality. My heart beat like a racehorse, and my breathing was labored as I boldly went where it seemed no man had gone before.

But all that agonizing mystery and lurid curiosity vaporized when I found those tiny little metal cans next to the toilets that we don’t have in the men’s bathrooms. Once I figured out what goes inside those, my… life… was… forever… changed.

Also, it was at this job that I learned that adult diapers are a thing, and that scarred me for life. That was far more terrifying to a teenage boy than used tampons and pads.

You eventually get used to it, though. Until I had this job, I didn’t know that most of these things even existed. It was horrifying for a few weeks, then I became numb to it all, and it just became a daily routine. (Although some of my male peers bullied me when they found out that my job included disposing of dirty feminine products.)

When it comes to hygiene, there’s a HUGE difference between men and women

When I was a little boy, I was astounded at the weird sight of the ladies’ room at the church I grew up in. Mommies went in and out, and when the door opened, I could catch a glimpse of a couch and a lamp inside. I pondered this great mystery of life for many years.

Why on earth would you put a couch in a bathroom? What was the purpose of a little lamp with a table?

What were women doing in there?!

When I became a janitor, I unlocked the mystery of the women’s bathroom. It’s more properly called a “restroom” since in a women’s room, you can literally rest there.

I have never seen furniture in a men’s room, but let me tell you: what women expect from their bathroom experience is vastly different than anything known to men.

To the women who might be reading this, in case you don’t know, here’s what men have in their bathrooms: a toilet (or two), some urinals, sinks, and soap. That’s it.

There may be Kleenex, but that’s certainly not necessary. Even if there is, men will still just grab some toilet paper to wipe their noses in a pinch.

To any men reading, prepare to have your minds blown. What women have in their bathrooms may include any of the following: toilets, sinks, soap, Kleenex candles, lotion, air freshener spray, potpourri, plants or flowers, paintings on the wall, lamps, tables, sofas, and baskets of feminine products.

Seriously, guys, it’s an entirely different experience—you have NO IDEA.

Before I worked as a janitor, I wondered why on earth women said such weird things like: “I’m going to go to the bathroom; anyone wanna come with me?”

We young men would just stare in amazement as two, three, or even more women would say, “Yeah, I’ll go,” and grab their purses and follow each other into that weird, secret place with warm, dim lighting. After I spent a few weeks on the job “janiting,” I wondered no longer.

It’s a whole different world in there, men.

I learned so much about women in general by cleaning up after them in their most intimate spaces. Actually, I suppose you can learn a lot about the differences between men and women by knowing what goes on behind closed doors.

Sometimes, people don’t pay attention to us janitors

Normally, I didn’t mind being ignored. I liked quietly doing my job and minding my own business. Sometimes, though, I wish people would’ve paid more attention to me.

Every once in a while, I’d be in the women’s bathroom and have the door clearly roped off, with a sign saying it was being cleaned, and some woman would just move the barrier, walk into the bathroom, and sit down on the toilet… while I was still in there.

Imagine this: you’re a teenage boy, wiping down a toilet bowl in the bathroom, squatting on the floor, or even down on your hands and knees, when a woman your mother’s or grandmother’s age walks right into the stall next to you, lifts up her big fluffy dress, drops her underwear and starts doing her business.

This was always exceedingly uncomfortable, and I have no idea why they did this.

Did they not see the sign?

Did they not see me inside the bathroom?

Did they just not care?

I don’t know. But I’d usually high-tail it out of there as fast as I could and stand around pretending to look busy, waiting for her to finish her business and leave, then I’d go back in. It was so embarrassing. I always avoided looking at her face, whoever she was, so I wouldn’t wince and blush if I saw her again during the church service.

Cleaning a big, empty building can be lonely and nerve-wracking

The work itself was really quiet, and I was thankful that I had a calm, peaceful workplace and a nice, calm working pace.

Since we only had services on Sundays and Wednesdays, the church building was usually very quiet the rest of the week. This could cause problems, though.

Being alone in an empty building for six or seven hours at a time, then opening a door and staring straight into the eyes of another human, startled the daylights out of me.

Most people are pretty quiet when they walk into an empty building, and since I mostly worked downstairs (where everything was carpeted), the place was as silent as a morgue until, all of a sudden, I’d turn around a corner and see someone I wasn’t expecting which scared both them and me.

To solve this problem, I learned to wear my keychain hanging from my belt loop. This was really loud and annoying and made me look like a dork, but this way, people could hear me coming from a distance.

(Yes, there’s actually a reason why janitors always have such giant jangly keychains you can hear when they walk. This is on purpose… or at least it was for me.)

Listening to music can be dangerous (or embarrassing)

To keep myself entertained, I sometimes listened to music. But I found that this could be dangerous because it meant I couldn’t hear people coming up behind me, or I might go to open a door, and someone would open it right into my face.

To solve this, I just started whistling or singing out loud. This helped people know I was there, but it was embarrassing, too.

One afternoon, I was singing very, very loudly, belting out Enrique Iglesias:

“WELL, I CAN BE YOUR HERO, BABY!!”

I spun around, and dramatically yanked open the door of the room I was cleaning and nearly walked right into a woman who was about to walk in.

She stood there, white as a sheet, absolutely terrified—literally trembling from fear. I apologized in a very quiet voice and walked away quickly (and quietly) in shame.

I had to erase things and throw away people’s stuff

One of my jobs was removing the tiny little rubber door stoppers that people would sometimes put under the doors to keep them open. Doing this was a safety violation and against the fire code, so I was required to throw them away if I found them.

It turned out that Sunday School teachers would sometimes buy them with their own money and bring them to the church to prop open their classroom doors.

But what they didn’t know was that whenever I’d find them, I’d toss them. So it turned into a weird game of whac-a-mole: I’d clean out Room #119, see a door stopper, and throw it away. The next week, another door stopper magically reappeared in Room #119. On and on it went.

They got smart and started buying multi-packs, bringing 2, 3, or 5 door stoppers at a time. I’d find the first one, throw it out, then root through the cabinets in the classroom, looking for fugitive door stoppers.

New, unopened, shrink-wrapped three-pack of door stoppers? Straight into the trash.

The weird thing is, nobody ever complained to me about this.

I wondered why they never brought it up, and I also wondered why the church never made an announcement about the rules. People are funny like this: what a strange communication breakdown.

Sometimes, people teaching a class would scribble all over the entire whiteboard and then write, “Please don’t erase.” Why did they do this? You know what I did when I saw that?

Erase. Instantly.

What made them so special? They had no idea who else would be using that room later in the week, and if you let marker sit on a whiteboard that long, it can make permanent marks on the board.

Also, people would sometimes bring their own markers with them. This was perfectly fine as long as they were genuine dry-erase markers, but sometimes, they weren’t. So, once again, I’d find unapproved markers in the tray at the bottom of the whiteboard and plop! — right into the trash with them.

I didn’t always throw away people’s stuff, though

I was in charge of the “lost and found.” We never really had anything very valuable like money or electronics, but there were a lot of jackets, hats, and water bottles. Very few people ever came to claim their stuff. After two weeks (I think), we were allowed to take whatever we wanted, give it to a thrift store, or throw it away.

There were only two things I specifically remember in the lost and found.

One was a big, red “diver’s flag” beach towel. As a scuba diver, I really wanted this. I waited the required amount of time, then took it home. YES! I use it all the time, still to this day, especially when going to the gym. It’s my favorite towel ever. I can’t believe I’ve had that thing for at least 23 years now. (Thank you, whoever you were, that person who lost that great towel at the church that day!)

The other was a super-top-secret notebook filled with storyboarding illustrations, written dialogue, and program notes for some kind of show. At first, I thought it was a joke. But I found out that one of the writers for the famous radio show “Adventures in Odyssey” went to our church, and, in a moment of Christian teen nerdiness, I realized that I was holding a book with handwritten notes for upcoming Adventures in Odyssey episodes and that felt pretty special. (He got his book back, by the way.)

People who try to “help” really aren’t helping

I appreciated the idea behind some people trying to help us by cleaning up their own messes, but I was often surprised at how bad they were at doing it.

They’d use the dry-erase spray to clean a whiteboard but just rub the eraser in it, making a huge gray circle that I’d have to clean up later with Windex and paper towels.

They’d use paper hand towels to “clean” off the bathroom countertops, but all it really did was smear a thin, soapy film everywhere, which made it even worse.

They’d find a crappy, tiny vacuum in a closet and somehow vacuum in such a way that just spread the mess all over the whole room instead of just in one spot. Not helpful.

Side note: the most annoying things to clean up are popcorn and glitter. Kids often use both of these at the same time, which is the most time-consuming of all.

Being a janitor meant doing lots of other weird, menial tasks

Aside from just mopping floors and scrubbing toilets, sometimes I had to fill in as needed with other various tasks that had little to do with “janitorial” cleaning at all.

It might be angle-grinding ornamental metal railing for the outdoor steps, using a hot iron and parchment paper to get the candle wax out of the chair fabric from the Christmas Eve candlelight service, replacing lightbulbs, installing batteries on smoke detectors, and checking all the levels of the fire extinguishers.

The most tedious job of all, though, was moving chairs.

Ugh. The chairs…

It seemed like a big percentage of my job was just moving chairs: putting them up, taking them down, moving them around. Rinse; repeat.

I was simply amazed at how far a chair could travel in a giant church building. I knew where all the chairs went because certain kinds of chairs went in certain rooms and not others. Yet, sometimes, random chairs would pop up in the weirdest places, and we couldn’t figure out why.

One day, we had a genius idea! We could solve this problem by putting room numbers on the bottom of all the chairs. We spent hours finding every single chair and writing the room number where it belonged on the underside in Sharpie marker.

On paper, this was brilliant. In practice, it was a total disaster.

The chairs got so completely scrambled up that it didn’t even make sense anymore, and every chair in every room had the wrong room number on the bottom. We fought this for a few weeks but then realized it was a total waste of time and gave up.

This added to the sense of meaninglessness I felt as a janitor at the time: I felt like a boy who doesn’t want to make his bed in the morning when he wakes up because he knows he’s just going to make it messy again when he hops back into at night.

Being a janitor is kind of like that.

We come to work after Sundays and pick up the mess of discarded paper bulletins, empty the leaky garbage bags filled with styrofoam coffee cups, wipe off the water spots from the bathroom mirrors, and restock all the toilet paper.

Everything is shiny and clean, gleaming and bright, good-smelling and pretty looking, and then the hordes come right back into the building and trash it all over again.

It can seem so senseless and futile. Or, if you choose to look at it in a different way, it can be inspiring, knowing that you helped make it all happen. If you believe in the cause and think that what happens inside the building is worthwhile, you can be proud that you contributed to the good work that goes on during the services.

I learned to see it that way over time.

(On a side note, while we were still in chair-numbering mode, out of boredom, instead of writing the room number on one chair, I scribbled Van Halen lyrics on it. My boss found it almost immediately and confronted me about it. I still can’t believe how quickly that happened, even in the confusion of the flurry of chairs everywhere!)

By the way, for any church patrons out there: If there’s one thing you can do to help your janitors that is really, truly helpful and doesn’t require any cleaning skill at all, it’s stacking your chairs after services if asked to.

That’s the thing we appreciate more than anything else. It might take me an hour or two to set up 1,000 chairs in the sanctuary myself, but if everybody at the end of a service pitches in to put them away, it will only take 6 or 7 minutes. That’s a lifesaver.

Beware the lack of separation of church and state in your employment agreement

A year or so into my job, things got awkward. When I first started working there, my family was attending the church, and my parents were church members. But then, they decided to go to a different church… while I kept working there. I kind of hoped nobody would notice until, one day, the manager called me over to talk to him.

“Ron, I know that your family found a new church and they don’t go here anymore.”

I gulped hard and looked at the ground in embarrassment. I felt like my family had sinned against this church somehow and that I was also to blame.

“Just to be clear, I don’t have a problem with that at all. You don’t have to attend here in order to keep working here.”

Phew! What a relief! So it wouldn’t affect my job after all.

I appreciated this moment of clarity. But after other people started noticing, they started acting weird around me.

When people I knew saw me cleaning the building during weekdays, they’d say, “Oh, wow, you’re still here? I haven’t seen you in a while! Where have you been?”

I felt pressured to explain myself: “Well, my parents decided to switch churches…” and they’d inevitably ask something like, “Oh, really? Why?” and I hated getting into it and didn’t want to talk about it.

After this bump was smoothed over, the church hired a new pastor, and it was clear that he was the new sheriff in town. I was told that I was now required to go to a bible study on Wednesday mornings. It was during business hours, so they paid me for my time, but I thought it was strange that it was required as part of my job, especially since it hadn’t been before.

What if I wasn’t a Christian? Would I have even been allowed to work there in the first place if I wasn’t a Christian? I wasn’t sure, and this blurring of the lines between work, church, God, friends, and money started to wear on me.

Did I want my own personal faith to be so closely integrated with my ability to make a living? I didn’t think so. (Although when I quit later and ended up working full-time at another Christian ministry in the mountains, it turned out I jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire, but that’s a story for another time).

Also, what if I shared something terrible with the rest of the office staff during one of those studies that they weren’t prepared to hear? What if I had said I was smoking marijuana or fornicating with my girlfriend? What if I said I didn’t believe in God?

Would they have fired or demoted me? Just how intertwined was my own personal witness with my job performance? This became very uncomfortable over time.

One of the most frustrating parts about all this was how I was subject to an annual review, which I always thought was strange because I figured if I was doing something wrong, they should just come out and tell me right then and there and not save it up for one big yearly meeting with all that weird pressure.

Also, the worst aspect of this was that the person who gave me my annual review was a pastor, and he was someone I didn’t even work with, so that didn’t make sense either. How would he even know how I was doing?

We would meet in a cramped, windowless office with harsh fluorescent lights that buzzed, and he’d slowly read from a little square piece of paper that had a table of criteria to judge employees on.

It had boxes like “professional skills” and “spiritual formation,” which, again, started to blur the lines in a weird way. The criterion I always thought was most unfair, though, was “personal appearance.”

I felt this was totally irrelevant, and I was always offended that he always checked the “satisfactory” option and never the “excellent” option.

How can a janitor have an excellent personal appearance? Should I have worn a top hat and bowtie for my job scrubbing toilets?

Overall, it was a great job, and I generally recommend janitorial work for kids

In the end, I have to admit that being a janitor is a great job, especially for a teenager.

You get to perform a valuable service to humanity, and it’s a good skill to have that will always be in demand.

I started out at $7.25/hr (which was higher than minimum wage) and got a few raises while I worked there. It was a steady, dependable job, even if it wasn’t sexy like being a lifeguard at a pool (like most of the other boys my age I knew), but it was low-maintenance, low-conflict, and I got to work alone and not be bothered by anyone.

When I was first hired, I was 15, so I was too young to drive, and there were all these dumb child labor laws that said I could only work certain hours on certain days, but not too many hours, and other lame crap like that. It was extremely obnoxious.

When I turned 16, though, I wasn’t subject to those rules anymore, and since I had saved up $500 from my first few months of paychecks, I was able to buy my own car and work as many hours as I wanted.

And I felt like an adult. And, in truth, it truly was my first foray into adulthood. Holding a vacuum in my hand gave me tremendous power, and mopping the floors was my ticket to freedom and independence.

When I turned 18, the church staff gave me a birthday cake, and everybody sang for me. That made me feel really special. When I quit a few weeks later, they were sad to see me go. By then, though, I was totally burned out and needed a change of scenery.

Well, actually, what really happened is that one day, I looked at one of the other men who was at least 30 years older than me, working an extremely similar job to myself, and thought: “Holy shit, if I stay here, I’m going to end up just like him!”

I had a vision of myself, 30 years in the future, just older and grayer, still doing the same job every week at the same building, cleaning the same toilets and mopping the same floors after Sunday services, now with a wife and kids, asking for a meager cost of living wage increase each year… and I nearly had a panic attack as a result.

This image was terrifying.

I HAVE GOT TO GET OUT OF HERE!

I was having a fit of anxiety and existential dread.

I didn’t say this to the church staff, but that’s what I was thinking. I just told them I was ready to move on to bigger and better things or something like that.

A few months after I left, I was pleased to hear that they had to hire two people to replace me, and I was told I was “the best employee they ever had.”

That made me feel even better.

In conclusion, being a janitor was a good choice for my first job, and I appreciated the opportunity of being able to grow through my own awkward years in a relatively safe environment with people who cared about me (most of them, anyway).

Changing from a skinny teen boy to a legal adult was a formative experience, and I learned a lot of life lessons in a short time span and gained a sense of autonomy and pride in my work.

I also gained a strong sense of skepticism toward authority here, especially when it came to “spiritual authority,” bestowed arbitrarily on people who may not deserve it. These days, I am extremely reluctant to submit myself to an employer who also perceives themselves to be my spiritual authority as well.

Finally, I learned: shit happens. Sometimes, people smear it on the walls… even in church. Get over it. Wipe it off, smile, and move on.

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