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On Mother’s Day I go to church with Mom.
She’s still with our old home church, Central Christian, though
it’s hardly the same church I grew up in. Central has become our
small town’s version of a megachurch. Over the past 20 years it has
leaped enthusiastically into the contemporary-worship movement, first
ditching hymnals in favor of projecting the words on a screen (“If
the projector bulb ever burns out, we won’t be able to have
church,” my late father used to grumble) and then taking out the
choir loft to make room for a band and “praise team.” A few
years ago Central completed a multimillion-dollar worship center with
advanced lighting, sound, and audiovisuals. Its trendiness has been
rewarded: People are flocking to join the flock. I ran into a friend who
grew up there with me and stayed. He’s now a member of the board, so
I thanked him for taking good care of the place that means so much to me
and my family. “It’s not easy,” he said.
“We’re growing so fast.” That’s not a problem
I’ve had in the church I belong to, where the theology is more
liberal and the worship more traditional — but I didn’t tell
him that. As I looked for Mom among the hundreds swarming
through the atrium between services, one of my high-school classmates, who
has been coming to Central for only a few years, greeted me
enthusiastically: “What brings you here?” I thought he was
kidding. “It’s Mother’s Day,” I responded. He said,
“Oh, your mom goes here?” I could excuse him for not knowing
that this is my old church, but how could he not know it’s hers, when
she’s here about every time the doors open? “He probably goes
to the 10:45 service,” Mom explained after we found each other.
“I usually go to the 8 o’clock or the 9:15.” I was
heartened to see several of my mother’s contemporaries, who had been
my Sunday-school teachers and Vacation Bible School leaders, seated with
their “kids,” who had been in my youth group and are now
pushing 60. As we took our seats in the auditorium, I remembered the
special feeling I had as a kid when just Mom and I went to the Sunday-night
service, where we sang hymns together. Dad stayed home to watch Bonanza. For him, church just
once on Sunday was enough.
The house lights went down, the stage lights went up,
and, at the top of an elaborate set that looked like a bridge to heaven,
the drummer launched the service from on high. (“Mom’s church
has gone Las Vegas,” I once said at a family gathering. “More
like Branson,” my Missouri brother-in-law corrected.) Guitarists
joined in and then the praise-team vocalists followed with “Give it
up. Give it all up.” I didn’t know exactly what we were giving
up, though the theme of the service was “surrender.” As the
lyrics came on the screen, I could see why these praise tunes are called
“711 songs”: seven words repeated eleven times. The video announcements included footage of the
children’s stage performance from last Sunday, for thos who’d
missed it. Then came the dedication of several babies, with something else
we didn’t see in the 1950s and ’60s: One of the babies was
introduced with just her mom — no dad mentioned, no questions asked.
Some things haven’t changed; as in many other conservative churches,
there are still barriers to women in leadership. But many things have; I
saw a couple of black faces in the crowd, a difference from back then.
Central reaches out to the poor with food pantries and soup kitchens more
than we ever did when I was young. The church’s divorce-support group
would have been unheard of in those days. The preacher, in a polo shirt (I was the only one
there wearing a tie), delivered a sermon in his “Prayer for
Dummies” series on the Lord’s Prayer. His central point was
that prayer reminds us, “God is God and I am not.” I
couldn’t agree more, and was thinking that the theme could be
expanded beyond the purely personal to include groups such as the U.S.
military, but he didn’t go there. The ushers had handed out a page of
sermon notes, with blanks to fill in. “Write this down,” the
preacher said. “I surrender to God’s control.” To close,
we got to sing an old hymn, because it fit the theme. There was no hymnal
to share, but everything else was the same as when I was a boy, with Mom
and I singing together, “All to Jesus, I surrender, all to him I
freely give. . . .”
Contact Fletcher Farrar at ffarrar@illinoistimes.com.
This article appears in May 8-14, 2008.
