We began with just three of us that first Sunday night—Gus and Ed, who were fraternal twins, and me. Gus and Ed were there under duress, I think—their parents made them show up. I was there because I was already the kind of kid who was in church whenever the doors were open. From that inauspicious beginning, we grew; by the time I was a senior in high school, we had forty to fifty kids coming on Sunday nights before the evening service.
Youth group was like a church service, except with skits instead of sermons. We sang; we took an offering. We had a program. We elected officers—I was president twice, I assume now because no one else wanted it, rather than because of my leadership skills. We traveled to other Baptist churches to watch black-and-white Moody Science films or Christian musicals on film. We had Bible Bowls; I remember being on a quiz team that studied the book of Daniel for our competition against other youth group teams. Every December we presented Christmas pageants and plays; we went caroling. We also had fun at other times, and lots of it, thanks to indefatigable leaders who were in their thirties. We played miniature golf and went swimming. We went roller skating at Springfield Lake’s rink, where I was hopeless on wheels, often with one of the younger guys toting me around. We went bowling—another pastime in which I was hopeless—but we bowled only at lanes that didn’t have a bar. Even though none of us were old enough to drink, we were “abstaining from every appearance of evil,” as Scripture exhorted.
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[This photo is the interior of my home church now. The pews and lights are the same, and the two windows to what was once an upstairs nursery. Everything else is different. We did not have guitars or wear shorts.] We took prayer seriously at my home church, with a one-hour prayer meeting on Wednesday evenings. These hours included a brief sermon rather than the usual 45-minute one on Sundays, and some singing. But most of the hour was spent praying. To pray was to kneel, sliding to the linoleum floor from our pale wooden pews and somehow turning our bodies so that we could rest our arms on the seats we’d just vacated. When I discovered kneelers in the Episcopal Church decades later, I felt a sense of homecoming, of comfort. We were convinced that only extemporaneous prayer was sincere. How could one possibly pray words that had been written down beforehand and printed in a book? We scorned such artifice; surely this type of prayer was a contemporary example of the “vain repetitions of the heathen,” as Jesus put it in the Sermon on the Mount. What extemporaneous prayer meant in practice was a lot of hemming and hawing and “Now, dear Lord, we ask you to remember our brother x.” Repetition was rife; if someone was ill, everyone who prayed aloud that night prayed for him or her. And there are only so many ways to ask God to “send Your healing blessings” on another. Extemporaneous prayer and prayer requests also opened the door for gossip. I don’t know how it was when the men prayed together at their Saturday morning prayer breakfasts, but when women got together to pray, the requests were often about personal relationships. We heard of wayward children, failing marriages, difficult diagnoses. Some women I knew took seriously St. Paul’s admonition to pray about everything, including finding open parking spaces and pantyhose free of runners. The favorite way to avoid gossip was to have an unspoken request. This did two things: it made the requestor feel better, knowing she was being prayed for, and it kept the rest of us from knowing what was going on. Unanswered prayers were a problem. Jesus said to ask in faith and we would receive. Did we not have sufficient faith to move mountains? Attending church on Sundays and Wednesdays was not enough during the summer. We got an extra dose of Jesus for a solid week of activities and Bible study during Vacation Bible School, otherwise known as VBS. Some years the sessions were held in the morning, some years at night, as adults tried to figure out the best schedule for busy parents and for the adults working with the kids. We marched into the church for opening assembly singing “Onward Christian Soldiers,” music composed by Arthur Seymour Sullivan. Yes, that Sullivan, half of Gilbert and Sullivan. The man could do more than write patter songs. One child carried the Christian flag and one carried the national flag. They were placed in holders at the front of the church so that we could pledge to each as part of the opening. I regret to say there were handicrafts involved in VBS. I remember making a cross out of matches that had been struck, so that the match had a blackened edge. One of our youth group leaders had been striking matches and blowing them out for days beforehand. Here’s what I remember best, perhaps the only Bible content I can actually pinpoint when and where I learned it. Ephesians 6 is an extended metaphor and encouragement to “Put on the whole armor of God.” One year, that became our theme. We spent the week learning about the breastplate of righteousness, the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation. We made all the armor—probably much innocent aluminum foil was sacrificed. And it all fit with the “Onward, Christian Soldiers” theme. Why I should remember this, when the whole analogy is male, baffles me. Perhaps part of the reason may be because we didn’t spend time on any feminine metaphors, which are few enough in Scripture. I had to find on my own, many years later. |
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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