Question about an Apostolic tradition

[Ferd]

This reminds me of the story of the lady who was cooking a roast using her grandmother’s recipe. It called for cutting the roast in half.

She was wondering about that so she asked her mother and her mother said “well, that’s how my grandmother did it, how my mom did it and that’s how I do it.”

Tradition.

The lady decided to ask her grandmother and the answer was a bit different. Grandma laughed and said, well when I was small, my mom’s oven was too little to cook a whole roast in one pan, so she cut it in half and cooked it in two pans.

That was how I was raised, so even though I got a larger oven when I had my family I still did it the way my mom did it.



Pentecostals and Sunday night are a bit like that.
In the very early days, the churches were far apart by their standards as they walked or rode in buggies just as often as they went in cars to church in large parts of the country. Remember that America was far more rural in those days.

People would travel a long way to church on Sunday morning, have Sunday school, then eat the lunch they packed “on the grounds” then have their larger service after the afternoon of relaxation before making the long trek back home that evening.

As affluence seeped into the rural parts of the country in the 1940’s and 50s, and as churches opened in smaller communities, people didn’t have to travel for long periods of time, but the feeling of community that had developed was still appreciated.
That turned into two services on Sunday, with large attendance in the evening.

It is tradition. It developed out of the early period of the Pentecostal movement. It is starting to change. We are less connected culturally to our church. That has a huge part to play in the change.