Whirled Views with Dan Burrell

It’s been a couple of weeks without a “Listomania”, so I thought I’d lighten the mood with a fresh one.  One of my favorite blogs in the whole blogosphere is “Stuff Christians Like” by Prodigal Jon.  Maybe it’s just his way of writing or the fact that those of us who grew up evangelical/fundamentalist can relate to the things in which he finds humor, but the guy just cracks me up every time I read him.  We pompous religious types sometimes take ourselves WAY too seriously and sometimes it would do us good to look at the caricatures we tend to become.

So, this edition of “Listomania” is “Fundy Traditions that Made Me What I Am Today”.  With tongue firmly in cheek, I begin.

1. The New Year’s Eve “Watchnight Service”

The annual New Year’s Eve Watchnight Service was a fixture in most evangelical churches of my youth.  It constituted of a service that started around 7:00 with lots of singing (see item #6), the “main” sermon by the pastor, if there was an associate he was able to speak too and then all the “preacher boys” were allowed to get up and rant and rave for about 15 minutes each.  Then there would be refreshments in the basement consisting of vegetable trays and pimento cheese sandwiches washed down with instant tea.  After that intermission, it was back to the auditorium for the “movie” (a rare treat because many of us were not allowed to attend the Cinema House).  These movies were from one of three categories — Billy Graham, Bob Jones University Unusual Films (Sheffey, Flame in the Wind) or Independent (I could write a whole blog on Estes Pirkle’s – no I did NOT make up that name – “The Burning Hell” or that cult-classic “If Footmen Tire You What Will Horses Do?” which you have to youtube to believe.)  Finally, at about 11:55, everyone would gather up front of the church and “Pray out the old  year and pray in the new year”.  There was always a sneaking suspicion that the rapture just might occur at the stroke of midnight – or at least it seemed that way to me.

2. The 8-Day Revival

Now this was a great tradition.  Starting on one Sunday, the 8-Day Revival ran until the following Sunday night.  It always involved a guest speaker – and if you were lucky – guest music as well.  The evangelist was usually a firebrand from somewhere “down South”.  Often they were of the “wind-sucker” variety which means, if you really got them wound up, they would suck the price tag off Minnie Pearl’s hat if she was sitting 12 pews back.  Each night was a different theme to encourage you to bring guests.  There was “pack-a-pew” night, family night, neighbor night, co-worker night, etc…  If you brought the most guests all week, you might win the giant Family Bible.  Sometimes the invitations for the 8-Day Revival would last longer than the sermons and to this day I know all the verses to “Just As I Am”, “Almost Persuaded” and “Softly and Tenderly.”  At the end of the 8-Day Revival, we needed a family seminar because everyone was so grouchy from sleep deprivation that we were at each other’s throats.  Traditionally, there was a spring and a fall revival.

3. Vacation Bible School

Vacation Bible School – also known as VBS – usually happened during the hottest week of the summer.  It involved flannel graph – that unique precursor to Veggie Tales – wherein Bible lessons were taught using cut-out figures with flocking on the back of them that let them stick to backgrounds of flannel.  Super Kewl.  There was also arts and crafts time that used up a year’s supply of bleach bottles, pipe cleaners, cotton balls and if you were blessed – plaster-of-paris plaques!  Finally, there was cookie break supplied by the kind ladies of the church who brought cookies the two Sunday’s before VBS.  To wash down the cookies there was also “Bug Juice” aka Kool-Aid which only came in three flavors in those days – Red, Purple and Orange.  Sometimes it was even cold.  And yes, there was usually at least one gnat floating in the big giant bucket.  Bug Juice lost a lot of its appeal to me when I accidentally burst into the kitchen one morning to find Sister Lucille (a rather large lady with an odd shaped mole on her forearm) leaned over the giant plastic vat with her sleeve rolled up (on the moley arm) mixing it with her bare hand.  But her skin did have a nice smurfy look for the rest of the day.

4. Summer Youth Camp

Summer youth camp was the highlight of the summer after you outgrew VBS.  It involved loading up a huge suitcase and all your friends onto a school bus that migrant workers would have refused to ride.  You always added a few extra hours into the travel schedule for the inevitable breakdown or three.  We’d pack our lunches to save time and we’d lustily sing 99-Bottles-of-Coke-on-the-Wall (cuz’ good Baptist kids didn’t sing “Beer” on the wall – except for a few really rebellious guys, but we didn’t do it real loud because many of the spiritual girls were pretty and they kind of frowned on us even joking about beer.)  Our camp of choice was the Bill Rice Ranch in Murfreesboro, TN and it was the best camp ever.  Urine-stained mattresses, cold showers, red Tennessee mud everywhere and mosquitoes the size of pterodactyls did not diminish the thrills of melon marches, frog races, swimming in a REAL swimming pool, camp skits and the Friday Night “Banquet” where we all picked a pretty girl to sit by.  We all made “decisions” to be better teens on the last night and promised to cut our hair short, throw away our Carpenter’s albums and quit holding hands with our girlfriends in the back of the bus.  (That last commitment didn’t last real long if we left for the drive home immediately after the service.)  Then we’d trade addresses with our new best friends whom we never wrote to or saw ever again and sang camp songs all the way home.

5. Testimony Service

Testimony service at an evangelical church can have all the drama and humor of open mic night at the local karaoke bar.  You just never know what is going to pop out of someone’s mouth.  Old-school testimony givers always start off thanking God for their salvation and sometimes give you the details.  If you pay attention, you’ll eventually get to where you can give it as well as they do.  Then there’s the awkward silence times when no one gets up forever and the preacher then says “If someone doesn’t get up soon I’m going to sing” followed by nervous giggling and then three people stand up all at once and it just gets even more awkward.  Speaking of awkward, there’s always the chance that some maroon is going to stand up and give some sort of gut-wrenching confession that makes someone else in his family look bad as in “I just want to praise the Lord for His grace in my marriage and the fact that my wife has finally repented of her stubbornness and allowed me to move off the couch and back into our matrimonial bed.”   My personal favorite is the testimony service right before Thanksgiving or around some other holiday when some total stranger who has never been in the church before and, if the truth be known is about three sheets in the wind (if you know what I mean) and just feels like he MUST stand and give some testimony that is incoherent or borderline heretical.  Good times.

6. Sing-Your-Favorite-Hymn Service

This is almost always reserved for an evening service and consisted of having the song leader urge the congregation to shout out their favorite hymn number or title and then we got to see if the piano player could play by note or by ear.  These usually went quite well at first with three or four old favorites shouted out and then someone would get cocky and shout out some old English Anglican Hymn that was previously only sung in a cathedral on the Ides of March accapella by Gregorian monks.  The song leader bravely would tackle it with tepid effort as the pianist leaned close to the page and hit chords on the old upright that sounds like a like she was playing with her toes.  Oddly, the person who called it would be singing like they had the solo part for “Memories” at the Broadway Musical “Cats” obliviously to the caterwauling that was going on around them.  After one verse, everyone giggled nervously and someone would shout out a super familiar song and the tension would be broken.  The congregation sang with gusto and the relieved song leader would wave his arms like he was swatting flies and all was well again in the sing-your-favorite-hymn service.

7. Potluck Dinners

I personally believe that there’s a high probability that the Marriage Supper of the Lamb might be potluck.  If so, you can count on the fact that there will be sections for the various goodies.  First will be the salads.  I think this is the fake-out section.  They try to get you to load your flimsy paperplate with salads so that you won’t take too much fried chicken later and the people at the end of the line won’t have to get surly.  Following the salads, you will find pickles and raw veggie platters.  Then there’s Casserole Row.  There’s more ground up breadcrumbs and cornflakes hiding the-Lord-only-knows-what than you can shake a stick at.  What isn’t covered with crumbs and flakes is smothered in some type of Campbell’s soup.  Don’t ask; don’t tell.  Then there’s the meat section.  The hog farmers bring a ham – count on it.  If you are in the Carolinas – there will be pulled pork BBQ – Eastern (vinegary) and Western (tomato based) – but all quite tasty.  (You just can’t ruin BBQ.)  Then it’s the staple of the Potluck — Fried Chicken.  There are three types of fried chicken.  There’s the store-bought chicken (for shame, for shame – except when it’s from the Colonel and I’ll take extra-crispy, please).  That’s followed by the homemade done-from scratch chicken.  (If you’re in the country and you look carefully, sometimes you can actually find pinfeathers on your piece.  If you don’t know what pinfeathers are, again, I suggest – don’t ask; don’t tell.)  Finally, there’s the people who got store-bought chicken and then put it in their own container to make people think that they actually made it themselves.  Others will do the same trick with potato salad and slaw – like we can’t identify the KFC signature sides.  Depending on the time of the year, you’ll also get preserves, deviled eggs, fresh tomatoes and TONS of zucchini bread.  Of course, there’s a whole separate dessert section, but again – that’s for another blog article.

8. Missionary Speakers

Ah yes, the missionary speaker.  As a boy, we’d take bets on how long it would be before one of the following happened – a) the slide screen would collapse with a zip and a thud (it was always fun to watch the old lady with the hair net jump when that happened); b) a slide would jam or c) a slide would be upside down.  Of course, occasionally you’d hit a trifecta and all three would happen.  The narration always included a picture of some poor third-world family and the missionary would say, “This is the family of Pedro Gonzalez.  Pray for Pedro’s mother.  She’s Catholic.  She’s almost ready to convert, but the priest is intimidating her.”  Every single time.  Then there would be Q and A time when people would ask travelogue-type questions.  Then we’d hold our breath – hoping against hope that we’d be able to take an offering and go home.  But did that ever happen?  NOoooooo.  THEN there was the missionary sermon when the poor missionary would do his best to have one of us surrender to go to the mission field.  The invitation would continue until someone gave in and went forward to “pray about it” or express their willingness to go (which is short of actually saying I’m definitely going) and then we’d go home. 

9. Wednesday Night Prayer Meetings

Prayer meetings were held after a Bible study.  That’s why they often called them “Wednesday Night Prayer and Bible Study Meetings”.  Eventually, people decided to shorten them and most churches now just have a Bible study and hand out a prayer sheet which people leave in the car the rest of the week.  The Bible study was usually a study of a book of the Bible.  Then came the Prayer Time.  This began with prayer requests – the general requests (prayer for our leaders, our church, etc…), the sick (Aunt Bertha’s second cousin’s neighbor who has a leaky gall bladder and so on) and the unsaved (the regulars followed by a few new ones) and then the Pastor would ask “How many of you have an unspoken prayer request?”  This was for those who had something going on they didn’t want to blurt out in front of everyone, so instead, one just furtively raises their hand and let’s people speculate about what it is.  Then the pastor would generally call on 2-4 people to pray and he’d close.  This was a time of high anxiety as a good pick meant that prayer time wouldn’t be long, but the wrong pick – well, I hope you packed a snack.  There were different types of “pray-ers”.  There was the “Voice of God” pray-er who had a booming voice and prayed to the God of Jereboam, Rehaboam and all the Boam Boys – Johasaphat and all the Phat Phellows, and so on.  There was also the “Lordiac” pray-er.  This was someone who couldn’t utter more than three consecutive words in their prayers without injecting the word “Lord” as in “Lord, we thank you, Lord, for the beautiful, Lord, day, Lord, that we enjoyed, Lord.”  The record number of “Lords” in a Lordiac prayer that I can recall was 121.  When I announced that I had counted the number of “Lords” in Bro. Kent’s prayer that night my dad was ready to rail on me for my impiety except my mom piped up and announced that she had counted 122 “Lords”.  The rest of the ride home was rather quiet that night.

10. The “Right-Hand of Fellowship”

The “Right-Hand-of-Fellowship” ritual is a time when everyone shakes hands with their neighbors.  Because good Baptists sit in the same exact spot like they built the pew themselves, that meant that you generally shook hands with the same six people every service.  Except for us teen-age guys, who used the opportunity to find the cute girls and shake their hands long and slow.  Also, if you were a visitor, you got your arm halfway shaken off.  The other time you extended the RHF was at the end of the service when someone came forward at the end of the service for a “big” decision like joining the church, surrendering to the ministry, quitting smoking or something like that.  Oddly, everyone in the church seemed to come down with colds at the exact same time every year.

11. The Church Business Meeting

Church business meetings were generally once a month and were rather perfunctory.  They consisted of the reading of the minutes, someone reading the check register for the month and voting the new members in.  Occasionally however, there would be an exciting meeting that I swear must have been held during the full moon.  This was when normally placid, sweet-natured people who smelled of Old Spice and Este Lauder turned into snarling, snapping beasts that would sometimes threaten to “take it out to the parking lot”.  You usually knew when a bad business meeting was a brewing because someone would ask, “When’s the next business meeting?”  No one cared if there was a business meeting except when there was going to be a rumble.  Sometimes there was an organized effort.  You could tell when that was going to occur because attendance at Wednesday Night Prayer and Bible Study would suddenly spike with dozens of people that hadn’t been seen in church for months.  Often the pastor would deliver his Bible study that night in a trembly voice and would constantly wipe his brow with a handkerchief.  On those nights, he always called on the “Voice of God” pray-ers.

12. Sword Drills

I heart sword drills.  These were exercises when the game was to be the first person to find a verse of Scripture called out.  The leader would say, “Draw Swords!” (That’s Christian code for raise your Bible – the swift, powerful and two-edged version – above your head)  He’d then call out a Scripture reference – Psalm 1:9 (Sometimes they’d try to fool us by saying Hezekiah 3:16 and then all the newbies would search frantically while the rest of us “old evangelical kid pros would snicker piously).  Then they’d say “Go!”.  The first person to find the verse would stand and read the first few words and if it was correct, they’d get a point.  The sign of a real Sword Drill champ was to have enough verses memorized that you could fake having found the verse and pretend to read it when you were actually just quoting it.

So that’s my list.  It’s a long one, but once I got started, I couldn’t stop.  Now for my sensitive brethren and sisterns that think I’m crossing some sort of sanctified line with my reminiscing, let me say without hesitation that I LOVED growing up an evangelical fundy kid.  It was a GREAT way to grow up and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.  My memories of those days in a little country church make for great family stories and they are reminders of the depth of my personal commitment to Christ and His Word today.

But, I’m guessing that some of you have your own “favorite” fundy traditions.  So, share them here and let’s all laugh together!