SUNDAY MEETING
On Sunday morning, everyone was scrubbed clean and we put on our Sunday dresses and went to church. Uncle Alph stood by the church organ and led the singing. I thought the organ looked so strange because it didn't look like the organ Papa bought for us in 1910. The church organ was short
and it didn't have the mirror and the tall top like our organ at home.
But the music was just as sweet as the whole little church full of people sang the gospel songs like "The Sweet Bye and Bye" and "Jesus, Lover of My Soul" and "There Is a Fountain Filled With Blood." I wasn't too sure about the one, "When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder, I'll Be There." They told us that we had to be good if we expected to go to Heaven. I tried to be good, but I found that I wasn't good. It was years later that I learned that the Bible tells us there is none good. No, not one.
In the summer, every church in the area had a "protracted meeting." Today, these meetings are called revivals. As children, we went to Klegg to Methodist Sunday School, and once a month on Sunday afternoon, we went to Methodist Church that met in the Klegg schoolhouse. The circuit rider
preacher had so many churches that he could not come to Klegg on Sunday morning, but he brought the same message that told us to "give our hearts to Christ" and not to sin. I can remember so well where I sat on a long handmade bench one Sunday afternoon thinking, I am not going to sin next week. But you know, I never did reach that perfection.
As teenagers, we attended protracted meetings for several weeks in the summer. It didn't matter whether it was at a Baptist or Methodist, and occasionally a Holiness Church. At the Holiness Church, we sat in the car at night and watched the people sitting under the brush arbor.
The Baptists at my mother's church had services all day for about a week. They carried trunks full of delicious food and served it from a table built in the church yard. For the life of me, I cannot know why we never got ptomaine poison from food that was carried there in open wagons and was left in the wagons until dinner time. But never once did I ever hear of any illness from spoiled food. We had never heard of a
refrigerator. It was only in the 30s after I was married that I got an ice box, but even then, we had to go to town to buy ice.
If there were church services at night, the children did not go to a nursery because there weren't any. The children slept on quilts at the rear of the church. For churches which had morning and night services during the protracted meetings, it was arranged for the visitors to go to a different home every
day for lunch. Sometimes, the same ones stayed for supper before church time.
For the Baptist churches, a Baptismal Service was held at the end of the week at a nearby stream or a tiny pool just large enough to get baptized.
Mama's church finally decided to start Sunday School in the one-room church building. To accommodate the different classes, little spaces were cut off by hanging sheets from wire strung to form rooms.
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This ends the information from Mrs. Averett's Memories. She continued with writing about teaching. Since my mother and father were not teachers, I did not include that info in my blog. But much of her life experiences were identical to that of my parents and my early life.
I could remember doing many of the same things she described in the late 30s and early 40s when I grew up on a farm in the Curtis Community in the western part of Coffee County.
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