When one hears the word Baptist, one may think only of Southern Baptists, currently the largest Protestant denomination in the U.S. with a reported 16 million members. There are many varieties of Baptists, however. We were not Southern Baptists; we looked down on them as being liberal for their lack of attention to things that deeply mattered, such as not using tobacco or alcohol. We were the GARBC—the General Association of Regular Baptist Conference, the Garbs, as we called ourselves. Or, as a college friend explained, the Grand Army of Rebellious Baptists. The conference was founded in 1932, an age of fundamentalist heyday following the Scopes “monkey trial” in 1925. The GARBC was an offshoot of the Northern Baptist Convention, which had become too liberal for them. The GARBs were against denominational central control, thus the Association in the name. They were also opposed to “modernism,” and on the side of William Jennings Bryant, the lawyer who lost the Scopes case on teaching evolution in public schools. (John Scopes taught evolution; doing so was against the law in Tennessee, which was why it went to trial.) The GARBC was for separation from the world, quoting “Come out from among them and be separate.” They were also for “solid Bible teaching and preaching,” missions, and evangelism. The GARBS have their own colleges, mission societies, camps, and a press churning out a monthly magazine along with materials for Sunday School and Vacation Bible School. Nobody owned them exactly; they were also independent, but annually “approved” by the governing board, the Council of Eighteen. Some organizations have voluntarily left the group, which was perceived as being too narrow. Others have been voted out as being too liberal or associating with those who were. Don’t feel bad if you’ve never heard of the GARBC. At its height in 1984, it had 1,603 churches. That number has shrunk. My home church and my college are no longer in the group. Nor am I. By the way: The book pictured, on Psalm 23, was written by one of the founders of the GARBC. I remember hearing his chapel series on this book.
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Mrs. Jackson, our junior high girls’ Sunday School teacher, had sent her two children off to a Christian college, leaving her with time on her hands and a giving heart. She seemed old to me, but I think now that it was simply that she was overweight and did not dress stylishly—not that my church was a place for fashionistas, but the wardrobe options for plus-size women were even more dismal in the 1960s than they are now. But she had beautiful, porcelain skin. She was not much older than my mother, but she was soft and squishy (as I am now). And she giggled—not obnoxiously, but when she got “tickled” about something. She could make herself laugh thinking of the image of a person with a flat head when someone was described as “level-headed.”
I have no idea what, if anything, I learned from her about the Bible, working our way each week through the Sunday School quarterlies. (They were called quarterlies because each covered 13 weeks, so we went through four of them a year. They were usually Scripture-focused.) But Mrs. Jackson was an example of how to live, how to love adolescents. Sunday School teaching didn’t offer her enough scope, so she founded the Girls’ Missionary Society (GMS) to complement the Women’s Missionary Society (WMS). We met once a month, just as WMS did, but at her home instead of at the church. There were snacks and projects; these were often making clothing or baby blankets for missionaries to give away. We also read and wrote letters to and from missionaries. At the end of our time, we stood in a circle holding hands and sang a song that ended with the words, “You pray for me and I’ll pray for you.” Mrs. Jackson also made sure we had transportation to and from her house. I lived the furthest away, which gave me more time with her alone. One day, I was complaining about how easily hurt, how soft I was. I wanted to be harder so I could avoid all the emotional pain of being me. “But honey,” she said, “I think God means for us to be soft, to be able to be hurt.” With one sentence, she affirmed my sensitive girl-self. I became president of GMS, in large part, I suspect, because no one else wanted the job. So I was the one who presented our missionaries, Mr. and Mrs. Stansberry, with gifts for the children at their orphanage. Years later, when my college was sponsoring a Missionary Internship Service, I knew the missionaries I wanted to help. Decades later, when I began teaching junior high Sunday School, it was Mrs. Jackson's example I tried to follow. The church held to believer's baptism, in contrast to infant baptism. Infants were dedicated sometimes, but never baptized. Jesus, our example, was baptized as an adult. We disapproved of baptizing babies, who could not understand what was happening and its significance. (Decades later, an Episcopal priest asked me, "Do you understand what happens in baptism?") We practiced immersion, again following Jesus. Our baptistery was behind and raised above the pulpit. What we saw from the congregation was a window-like opening that let us view the pastor and the person being baptized from the waist up. On the back wall there was a beautiful river scene in soft colors painted by one of our missionaries from Central America; he touched it up every time he came home on furlough. If there was to be a baptism, the tank was filled and somehow the water was warmed. Men and women entered from different sides for modesty’s sake; each gender had a changing room off the baptistery. In white robes, the person was assisted down a few steps to meet the pastor. For me, the decision to be baptized came in seventh grade. I remember it vividly; I was out of my brace for the event, of course, a treat in itself. I had a new skirt, green with a gold coin print. I loved that skirt. My parents were both there, an unusual event. My mother was with me in the changing room to get me out of the brace, a maneuver that required pulling up on the two metal bars in the back. I could never get out of the brace on my own. Dad was sitting in the back of the auditorium, snuffling, embarrassing me. He may not have attended church regularly, but he got emotional about it pretty quickly. I stepped tentatively into the pool, my white robe billowing behind me. Dr. Luttrell, a grandfatherly type, baptized me, one dunk, holding my nose. The formula was “in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” Except he said, “I baptize you my little sister . . . ” And I have remembered it and his warm voice, because I wasn’t little physically, and because I was the big sister, responsible and in charge, held accountable if something went wrong with my little brother. No blinding light, no flash of insight, none of the strange, sudden warmth granted to Pascal or John Wesley. Life went on as it had before, but I had a deeper sense of belonging. On the first Sunday night of the month, we had communion. It was never called Holy Communion, certainly not Eucharist. It was, however, a somber event. Before the service, the deacons’ wives gathered in the kitchen to prepare the grape juice and crackers, which were broken bits of unsalted saltines. Some churches used already cut crackers, which we derisively called chiclets, because they looked exactly like the tiny pieces of peppermint gum. The grape juice was in sanitary individual small glass cups—shot glass size, actually, and heavy. They fit in a round heavy metal tray with a thin metal casing to keep them from sliding. The cracker bits were passed on large patens (not that we knew that word). The service rarely varied. In our churches, the communion table was placed on the floor level in front of the pulpit, which was on a raised platform with a few steps up to it and the choir loft. This placement, I later learned, was to signify that both preaching and communion were of equal importance. In liturgical churches, the pulpit is off to one side (the sermons correspondingly shorter in length), and the Table is the centerpiece. Speaking of centerpieces: on the Sundays that we did not have communion, we usually had a floral display on the table. In summer real flowers created a bouquet; in other seasons, it might be silk flowers (not plastic!) or in November, a cornucopia of fake fruits and vegetables. Memory suggests that these were also the responsibility of the deacons’ wives. We gathered for Communion at seven, our usual hour. The pastor took a seat at a folding chair behind the table and read to us Paul’s account of the Last Supper in I Corinthians 11. You would think he might choose one of the Gospel accounts, but that would eliminate part of the misery of the service. Paul wrote, “Wherefore whosoever shall eat this bread, and drink this cup of the Lord, unworthily, shall be guilty of the body and blood of the Lord. But let a man examine himself, and so let him eat of that bread, and drink of that cup.” We (men, women, and children) were to spend time in examining ourselves while the organ played some appropriately solemn music. The deacons passed the heavy trays; the crackers first, then the grape juice. We held our little pieces of cracker until everyone had received one, and then the pastor said something like, Let us together eat the bread. The heavy trays of grape juice cups were then passed; I was always fearful of not holding the whole conveyance tightly enough, or spilling my juice. I held my cup out over my lap to protect my skirt as I waited. When everyone had a little cup, the pastor invited us to drink together. Then we placed our cups in tiny cup holders that were built into the pew in front of us, with rubber linings to protect the glass. The deacons picked them up later for their wives to wash in the kitchen. The music for the service included standards such as “There is a Fountain.” I’ll give you a taste of the gore we endured. There is a Fountain filled with blood drawn from Emmanuel’s veins, and sinners plunged beneath that flood lose all their guilty stains. The imagery is absolutely medieval, like the woodcuts of the crucifixion showing people holding cups to catch the blood spurting from Jesus’ side. In no other way did we mid-twentieth century people mimic that period, but once a month, we sang that song and others with similar sentiments. Later, when I found the Episcopal Church, I liked walking up to the railing—kneeling as we are able—to receive the bread and wine. It is an active sacrament; we do not wait passively in our pews to partake of the grace of bread and wine. In many places, the Bible exhorts us to make a joyful noise to God, to sing out our praises. When I was growing up, the good folk at Highview Avenue Baptist Church sometimes took an entire Sunday evening worship service to do just that. The all-music format, known as a singspiration, offered a special joy, for we were a musical church. We were encouraged to call out the numbers of our favorite hymns, even to specify a verse of that hymn if we felt pressed for time. Four-part harmonies were a regular part of my growing up in that church. Even in youth group, which met before the evening every Sunday night service, we sang in four parts. Let me now praise the famous men and women who charmed my life. Evelyn, who became the first woman director of our choir, had trained professionally. She roused her son every morning by standing at the foot of the stairs and trilling an aria, and her soprano solos in church made me regret my alto voice. Mike played hymns on his harmonica while we sophisticated teens rolled our eyes. Evelyn’s brother Arnie played the tuba, then joined three other men to form a horn quartet. There was also a men’s vocal quartet; I was part of a young women’s vocal trio that included Cynthia, who played violin solos as well. And what more shall I say? For time would fail me to tell of the choir that sang each Sunday, despite only a few tenors; of the many fine soloists; of the organists and pianists and the joyful hymn-singing. Of the place that music held in our everyday lives. When the youth group clambered into the church bus—which seemed always on the verge of a breakdown—it was natural to sing hymns in four-part harmony on the way to our youth group events or camp. Hymns were of two styles. They could be lugubrious, for communion service or invitation hymns. We sang an invitation hymn at the end of both Sunday services that created a mood encouraging people to walk the center aisle to the front of the church and accept Jesus as personal savior and Lord. Or the hymns could be metrical and cheerful, incongruously melding happy music and words lamenting our sins. We never got over being sinners, worms, unworthy. Our relationship to God was of grateful deliverance. |
Baptist GirlI was a conservative Baptist girl who grew up to become a career Christian, working first in a Baptist school and then in a Baptist college. For about three decades, it was very good until it wasn’t, and I had to leave. But the Baptists formed me. This is my homage to the good times and good people of the world I left, finally, at forty-three, when I became an Episcopalian. These are my memories; others might disagree with my recollections. So be it. Archives
January 2024
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