[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?
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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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