I remember when...

[Sherri]

Growing up in church in the sixties:

My SS class was on the platform, along with another class, and we were only separated from the adult class by velvet curtains. We were not separated from the other kid's class by anything but about ten feet.

My Grandma Kloepper taught us and we could not leave the primary class until we could name the 66 books of the Bible, which I remember to this day.

We had an outhouse for the bathroom, until we progressed years later and got to use the bathroom in the parsonage. I never thought about how the pastor's wife must have felt about this until years later when I became one.

We had a SS class in the parsonage living room and another one in one of their bedrooms.

The pastor's office was a corner in the back of the church, with curtains around it, which he shared with a huge furnace.

We had a horse trough for a baptismal tank, and we kept it covered with a wooden plank which served as a table and collected all kinds of literature.

We got little bluebird pins on our birthday as we did the penny march.

We sang "Joy Unspeakable" and "A Child of the King" nearly every week, as my dad or my uncle led the singin'.

We had a board at the front of the church that listed attendance, offering, last week's numbers, etc. We rarely got over 40 in attendance.

We never won the Fellowship Rally banner, because we were the smallest church in the section, but we sure tried hard.

We drove to every Youth Rally and Fellowship Meeting every month, even though most of them were on school nights and were at least an hour away.

We only had carpet (used) in the center aisle between the pews, and at the altar area. The rest was wood floors. The pews were old and wood, and had no padding. You would stick to them in the summer and have to peel your clothes off of them when you stood up.

My cousins and I would count the number of times our pastor would say a particular "filler" phrase, keeping a tally for weeks at a time.

We prayed for my grandpa, who died in church, and saw him come back to life.

We had some very strange weddings, one in particular where the groom got mad at the reception and left by himself.

We had solos weekly by different people like "To Be Used of God", "Wasted Years", "I Love to Tell How Jesus Saved My Soul", etc.

We had no fellowship hall or gymnasium, but somehow church was the center of our lives!!!