I was moved in the Lord's power to thresh their chaffy, light minds, part two

The Haddonfield Friends meetinghouse is a brick building in a quiet, shady residential neighborhood, with a very pleasant cemetery across the road, featuring lovely old trees and small, inconspicuous gravestones. The church operates a private school for grades pre-kindergarten through eighth grade; private schools run by Quakers are very popular in this area of Pennsylvania and New Jersey. They have terrific reputations for academic excellence, and are usually quite expensive.

There are about twenty or so cars in the parking lot when I arrive. I notice that quite a few have bumper stickers (which is noticeable only because bumper stickers seem to have gone out of fashion in the last decade or so). These are Obama 08 stickers, and there are a couple that read “Thou shalt not kill” and “End the war.” Those certainly seem like good Quaker sentiments.

I was moved in the Lord's power to thresh their chaffy, light minds, part one

Haddonfield Friends Meeting
Haddonfield, NJ
August 12, 2007

What did I know about Quakers before attending this meeting? Unless eating lots of Quaker Oats oatmeal counts for something, not a lot. Most of what I did know was rather haphazard. I knew that George Fox was the group’s founder. I knew that the term Quaker had been applied to them derisively, because early members of the group shivered or “quaked” during meetings. I knew that Quakers had been among the important leaders in the Abolitionist movement in the US and England, that they are pacifists, and that their worship meetings consist mostly of stretches of silence, broken by people standing up and speaking as they are led of God – no sermon and no preacher. I knew that they believed in plain dress and, historically, addressed each other using the antiquated terms thee and thou.

Nostalgia

In the dumbest movie they can play it on us with a sunrise and a passage of adagio Vivaldi --
all the reason more to love it and to loathe it, this always barely choked-back luscious flood,
this turbulence in breast and breath that indicates a purity residing somewhere in us,
redeeming with its easy access the thousand lapses of memory shed in the most innocuous day
and canceling our rue for all the greater consciousness we didn’t have for past, lost presents.
Its illusion is that we’ll retain this new, however hammy past more thoroughly than all before,
its reality that though we know by heart its shabby ruses, know we’ll misplace it yet again,
it’s what we have, a stage light flickering to flood, chintz and gaud, and we don’t care.

C.K. Williams

Who doesn’t love a big dose of nostalgia, even though some other part of us simultaneously tries to resist its allure? Williams’ description – “this always barely choked-back luscious flood” – is so apt. Try as we will to seize the day, be here now, be mindful of the present, we know we’re constantly losing our past – the “lost presents” – every hour and every minute. Life – it’s all we have, and it’s always slipping away from us. So, even though “we know we’ll misplace it yet again . . . we don’t care.” This little poem is so good.

God always gets left off the hook. Always, always, always.

The Slapdash Godliness of a Good Girl is an interesting blog, written by a young woman who says "I may be in the process of de-converting from my once-strong Christian faith."

I'm not sure where she is now in her journey, as she hasn't posted for some time, but I will never forget the post in which she compares God to an abusive husband/boyfriend, "The blindness of the abused."

Though I speak in the tongues of men and angels

After posting about the worship service at Kingsway Church in Cherry Hill, I thought a bit more about my personal history with Assemblies of God churches and with pentecostalism in general. In the early 1970s, when our little group of enthusiastic and ill-informed Jesus people were trying to learn more about Christianity, we were welcomed warmly and kindly by several small pentecostal churches in the area - southern Illinois. To understand how odd this was, you'd have to realize that southern Illinois is very southern. It has much more in common with nearby Kentucky and with the Missouri Ozarks than with Chicago. The members of these local, mostly independent churches were sometimes mocked even by other southern Illinoisans as hillbillies and rednecks. Most members of these churches had only a high school education (or less), and many were coal miners.

And into their churches we wandered - a group of long-haired hippies from the local university, who wanted to know more about Jesus.

Here comes my Lord, on the cross

Kingsway Assembly of God
Cherry Hill, NJ
August 5, 2007

Kingsway Church is an Assemblies of God congregation, but you might not guess that from the home page of their website or from the Sunday bulletin. Like many churches striving to use contemporary methods to reach people, Kingsway seems to be downplaying its denominational ties a bit.

I wanted to include a Pentecostal church in my first group of visits, and AG churches are the group I think of first in this category. I was already somewhat familiar with AG churches – I was married in one, even though neither Neil nor I were members (the pastor who married us was named Billy Sunday!), and I’ve known quite a few AG folks.

Our Father-Mother God, all-harmonious

First Church of Christ, Scientist
Haddonfield, NJ
July 29, 2007

I did not attend church – any church – on July 22, 2007. I was in Boston working at a conference. While in Boston, though, I caught a glimpse of the Mother Church of the Church of Christ, Scientist – an impressive structure. I decided then and there to make the local Christian Science church my next visit.