There was only one church in the Elmdale community and it was Baptist. They controlled things in the community and the school. One of my classmates was a boy named Bobby Reik. Bobby was the Baptist preacher’s son. He seemed like a regular guy. I seem to recall he was a pretty good football player.
At Elmdale,the school was a Baptist parochial school for all intents and purposes. We had regular chapel services featuring visiting preachers. When the Baptists conducted their revival, their evangelist would come to the school and work at getting kids down the aisle. On one occasion, they wanted to meet with all those who just “got saved,” so they sent us incorrigibles back to the classroom. There we were shamed for not going forward. If anyone tried that today, they would be in big time trouble with the ACLU and the Supreme Court, but if there was any opposition to the practice back then, it never got anywhere. If anyone objected to the practice, he would quickly be branded a heathen.
My parents never objected to these instructions. I had not attended Sunday School since we left Clyde, so I guess they figured any kind of spiritual instruction would be helpful. Once, a visiting Bible teacher presented her case for total hereditary depravity. Of course I didn’t have any idea what that was back then. She held up construction paper cut in the shape of various colored hearts. I don’t remember the meanings assigned to the various colors except for the fact that a white heart represented a heart made clean by the grace of God and the black heart represented the heart defiled by sin. She completed her story by holding up the black heart and saying, “Every little baby that’s born into the world has a heart as black as this one.”
That disturbed me and I went home upset. I told my parents, “Did you know that every little baby that’s born is born with a heart that’s blackened by sin.” They assured me the Bible didn’t teach that. We had a conversation about the subject and that was the end of it. I don’t really think any damage was done. I was introduced to the doctrine of original sin, and I would eventually make up my own mind about it.
I would have to say that I owe a great debt to the Baptists. The teachers who came to our school, systematically taught us the Bible, especially the Old Testament. I owe my basic knowledge of the Old Testament to them. Our preachers didn’t talk about the Old Testament very much. They called it “The Old Bible.”
I developed an intense interest in Bible study during this time. The teachers brought a little paper back booklet containing the gospel of John. If you read it, you got something else and if you read something after that you got a New Testament. If you read the New Testament, you got a Bible. Actually I lied about having read it all. I’m not proud of that fact, but I will say I got interested in Biblical content, although the part about telling the truth telling didn’t sink in too well. However, I was very interested in the text and soon developed a reputation for Bible knowledge. They used to have spelling bee type of drills with Bible questions and most of the time they couldn’t sit me down. That may have influenced my later desire to preach in one way or another. The kids thought I really knew the Bible.
Once the Baptist evangelist came to our school and we were herded down to the auditorium to hear his sermon. At one point he said, “If you’ve ever told a lie, I want you to stand up.” They were masters at making you feel guilty. Well, I’d told some, so I stood up, but only one or two others in my class stood up. I had a feeling a bunch of liars were still sitting down. Then he asked us to remain standing if we had ever told a lied to our teacher. None of us wanted to deal with that kind of pressure, so we all sat down, even though I actually had lied about having read the entire New Testament.
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