Pilgrimage of Joy . . .

LIFE IN OUR FIRST MEETINGHOUSE
by W. Carl Ketcherside

It makes a difference when a congregation gets a meetinghouse of its own. There are some things about it that are good, and there are others that are not. The plan to purchase the old saloon building and move it to a new location worked like a charm. Even though it was before the days of chain saws, the men cut it in two and then fitted it back together on the lot which was a few hundred feet from the location of the Baptist building. To make it look more like a “church building,” a bell-tower was erected on the front which never housed a bell. It was a luxury which could not be afforded.

The very first meeting in the new location was noticeably different. It was more formal and “churchy.” We had been meeting in the grove on good days, and in the little living-room in our grandfather’s home on cold and rainy days. The grove was the best place. Sometimes while we were singing grandfather’s favorite song, “My latest sun is sinking fast, my race is nearly run,” you could look up at the fleecy white clouds and imagine that they were “the angel band” ready to bear you away on their snowy wings to your immortal home. Occasionally, one of the dogs would chase a squirrel right down among the benches and up a hickory tree behind the Lord’s Table. There is only one other thing on earth that can equal a dog in enlivening an open air meeting, and that is a three foot blacksnake.

Even on bad days it always was interesting. The children sat on the old rag carpet which “Aunt Peggy” had made on a loom. If they got tired they could stretch out and take a nap and no one cared. Aunt Peggy was a half-Cherokee Indian who had befriended our grandmother when she was an orphan girl and later on came to live with my grandparents. The deep wrinkles in her brown face bore mute testimony to a life of toil and privation. Aunt Peggy didn’t “go to church” but when the church came to her on rainy days she did not budge from her splint-bottom chair in front of the fireplace. She smoked a little clay pipe “during meeting” the same as at any other time, and it was interesting to see her make a “V” out of her fingers and put them to her mouth and spit. She never missed, and if a stray fly was unfortunate enough to walk in to range along the hearth, she neatly picked him off with an amber jet, regardless of what the worshipers around her were doing at the moment. I remember that during prayer we children always kept one eye closed for God’s sake, and the other one open and focused on Aunt Peggy who seemed almost as old and even more interesting to us than God at the time.

When we moved into the “church building” we children felt “boxed in” and things might have seemed very dry if it had not been for our grandfather who sometimes enlivened the scene because he was so deadly serious about everything that pertained to God. He had been crippled by a premature blast underground which had injured his spine when rocks rained down upon him, and although he surprised the company doctors after they had predicted his death, he was doomed to walk quite stooped and bent over the remainder of his life. The company gave him token employment in the warehouse where one of his tasks was to reduce the rodent population. One Wednesday he moved sacks of cattle feed and boxes of other commodities all day long and killed whatever rats he could with a long stick.

The old man was dog-tired when he came to meeting and almost as soon as he sat down in the corner of the front seat he fell into a deep sleep. It was while our uncle L.E. was on the platform that grandfather suddenly jumped to his feet and began poking under the seats and flailing about with his cane while shouting, “Get him! Get him! There he goes! Hit him! Hit him!”. Uncle L.E. called out to him but he did not hear. He was having a “rat-killing” good time in his sleep and took a healthy swipe at our bare feet which we hastily drew up in the seat. After my father had captured him and shaken him back to the world of reality and sat him down in his accustomed place, the proceedings seemed quite dull by comparison and we watched him anxiously, hoping he would fall asleep again. But he did not and the fun was over for that night.

Even when he was awake our grandfather often got things gloriously mixed up or said them backwards. It was the idea of L. E. that the whole congregation should be taught the whole word, and to achieve this objective he would read and explain a chapter while the audience followed along with open Bibles. Of course our grandfather could not read, but he always listened intently with his hand cupped behind his ear. Once when the subject-matter was Judges 15, which records how Samson slew a thousand Philistines with the jawbone of an ass, L.E. finished the text and asked that the books be closed while he questioned the hearers. When he got to my grandfather, he asked, “Pap, can you tell me how Samson slew the thousand men?” The old man was happy that he knew the answer. “He hit ‘em over the ass with a jawbone, son, yes sir, that’s the way he killed the whole passel of ‘em,” was the reply.

I could write all day and not exhaust the fascinating things that took place in this little gathering of humble and sincere people, but I must not tarry that long. Even the lives of we children were changed by the religious emphasis which now involved us seven days a week. We turned from playing house or store to “playing church.” Each morning we saved the left-over biscuits which were generally thrown over the fence to the pig, and these, together with a glass of water formed the emblems of our memorial service. The grape arbor was our “church house” and the congregation consisted of my younger brother and sister, two dolls (one of which was losing sawdust from a gaping wound in the lower abdomen), and myself. Our pup came to the first service, lying on the ground with his head between his paws, and seemingly enjoying it. But after we baptized him in the galvanized tub under the rain spout he forsook the church and returned to the world. Our father told us not to feel badly about it because the Bible said, “Without are dogs.”

Our meetings were held every thirty minutes and began with snatches of songs sung from imaginary books and led by my little brother. Sometimes he forgot the words and would have to improvise but that did not matter. We made a joyful noise unto the Lord. I was the preacher and I laid it on loud and heavy with such phrases as I could recall, and when I ran out of the remembered phrases, pounding the box in front of me and exhorting the two dolls to repent and be baptized. Regardless of their repentance they were baptized several times daily, while we stood around the tub and sang, “O happy day that fixed my choice.” The neighbor children next door watched through the fence, feeling left out and not knowing what we were doing. With their father in the “state pen” they had never seen a religious gathering.

The acquisition of “our own place of worship” as folks phrased it, made it possible for us to have “protracted meetings”, and start seriously to separate the chaff from the grain in the village, so that the chaff could be burned with unquenchable fire, while we stood by and watched from the golden portals. The first “evangelist” I ever heard was Daniel Sommer. He was booked for a meeting at Flat River and the brethren there “loaned him” to Cantwell to help our little group “get started off on the right foot.” He was an imposing figure, sixty-five years old, and priding himself upon his physical strength and endurance. He wore a knee-length double-breasted alpaca clerical-style coat, and when he took his stand on the platform he thrust his right foot forward and placed his hand in the front of his coat in a Napoleonic pose and his voice boomed out with authority.

Although I was but a mere lad when I first heard him I can recall lying on the grass under the shade of a tree and listening to him as he talked to men during the daytime. He felt he had saved the church from complete apostasy by reading his composition “An Address and Declaration” at Sand Creek, a rural congregation near Windsor, Illinois. In it he called for withdrawal from those who endorsed and condoned the church holding festivals to raise money, select choirs to do the singing, man-made societies for missionary work, and the one-man imported preacher-pastor system. He could quote from memory his closing sentence, “If they do not turn away from such abominations, we can not and will not regard them as brethren.”

The church had split before I came along and instrumental music had received the blame since it was visible to the eye. Now, Brother Sommer was preparing to “arraign the new digressives” on a hundred items. The “new digressives” were those who opposed instrumental music and missionary societies but who were “aping the sects” by creating a salaried ministry, or hireling pastor system. Brother Sommer envisioned the “so-called Christian colleges” as posing the greatest threat to the simple faith. He referred to them as “preacher factories” and warned that they would some day control the church through their alumni groups. One of his favorite words was “arraign” and he seldom finished an article in opposition to someone without formally “arraigning” him for a long list of items.

I suspect it gave us an ego trip to have someone come from as far away as Indiana to speak for us. In a day when a lot of folic had never even been to the county seat, Indiana seemed as far away as the North Pole. When you added to it the fact that the speaker had been to college and was the author of several books as well as being an editor of a religious journal, it was enough to make your head swim. Even the Baptists couldn’t top that so they stayed away from our meetings as we did from theirs. They stayed away because they couldn’t stand the truth; we stayed away because we couldn’t stand to hear error advocated.

The second preacher who came was William Grant Roberts. He had studied to be a debater and had gained a reputation as a “bold challenger of the sects” and as being “rough on rats.” Sectarians and rats were in the same category. In every public discourse, Brother Roberts debated with an imaginary adversary, carrying both sides of the controversy. He never lost such a discussion. Secure in the truth and standing firm on the rock he constantly rebuked denominational pastors who were not present for “spewing out their flopdoodle gush” as he referred to false doctrine.

He specialized in debating Mormons and Baptists, but took on anyone, sometimes having to study up to see what some group believed after having signed a proposition. If anyone asked him if he was hesitant about mixing with a formidable opponent, he assured them he would “tack his hide on the barn door with the bloody side out.” His debate in Flat River with a Methodist preacher by the name of Mothershead was characterized by such sharpness and sarcasm, that a complete generation had to pass before the hostility was alleviated. We won the debate and lost the world!