I remember when...

[Margies3]

[QUOTE=Sherri;377084]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.

Our SS class was right behind that door that went off of our platform. Right out in the open.

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.

Sis Forgy taught our class. She always brought us a small individual birthday cake on our birthday. One Saturday she was on her way to the store to buy that little cake for one of our girls when a carload of young guys ran a stop sign and hit her, killing her instantly.

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 an indoor bathroom. But it wasn't heated and it was nasty!

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

There were times that we had SS classes in the parsonage as well. Our parsonage was right behind the church and was the smallest thing you've ever seen. I've seen chicken coops bigger than our parsonage! Two tiny bedrooms, a living room taken up by an in-the-wall heater that heated the whole house, a bathroom you had to walk sideways in to get to the toilet and a kitchen big enough for a table and 4 chairs and no more.

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 sang "Victory in Jesus", "Joy Unspeakable", and "Oh I Want to See Him". That one we sang EVERY service for about a year!!! I also remember singing "there is going to be a meeting in the air, in the sweet, sweet by and by. We are going to meet Him, meet Him in the air, in that home beyond the sky. Oh what singing you will hear, never heard by mortal ear, twill be glorious I do declare. For God's own son will be the leading one at that Apostolic meeting in the air."

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.

us too. Unless we were having a SS contest. Then it even got over 100

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.

I remember certain people having horrible gas in the church van on the way home from youth rallies. WHEW!!

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.

Our furnace in the sanctuary was a wall unit about half way back on the left hand side. So that pew had to be cut down and made shorter so it would fit in. That was the place you wanted to sit if the weather was cold cuz it was the warmest place in the house. In the summer we had a window air conditioner. So in the summer you moved to the back two pews on the right hand side to be near the A/C.

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.

My pastor's daughter and I got called up in the middle of many sermons to have to sit on the front pew because we passed too many notes, or giggled too much.

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

Sis Forgy told me one time about all the people who had been "laid out" in our sanctuary because they couldn't afford a funeral home. And she made a comment about their ghosts (joking, I'm sure). But after that I refused to go to the church by myself ever again.

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.

yep, same here.And then there was the time that Marcella visited the church. Bro Dennis asked her to come up and sing us a special song. She jumped up on the piano and started to bang out "God's Gonna Gitcha For That" really loud!!

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

This is the part that I set out to agree with at the very beginning. But got caught up in all those other memories.