When Church Took Over

When I look back at my family history, I remember a time when my family was "normal" and "happy".  Before things got bad.  And I can even pinpoint the event that started it all.  Change often occurs slowly, the scales tilting imperceptibly, balancing until that pivotal Moment which tips the scale to the other side.

For us, the Moment came one Sunday after the morning service.  Us kids didn't know it was different than any other Sunday when we piled into the family car.  We were quite young: Indie would have still been a baby and I would be four years old.

Something was clearly wrong with Mom and Dad, however.  They were arguing about something and Mom was getting very upset. We pulled out of the church parking lot as the argument escalated.  Us kids sat in uncomfortable silence in the back seat. This may have been the first time I heard Mom and Dad argue, but definitely not the last.  Suddenly the car slowed down and Mom got out and marched away down the road. Us kids were distraught, not understanding, when Dad pulled away and drove us home.

I don't remember what happened after that, but my parents often retold the story.  That morning, Papa Preacher had approached Mom and Dad about teaching in junior church (a children's service which took place during the weekly adult worship service).  The key thing in all this is that neither Mom nor Dad wanted to do it, but Dad took Papa Preacher's request like an injunction from God and felt like there wasn't much choice in the matter.

Mom let her feelings be known.  She didn't want the preacher telling us what we had to do.  In the end, she repented of her rebellion (her words).  The rest, as they say, is history.  Their first Sunday running junior church went horribly.  It happened to be during a revival, and the guest speaker preached a loooong time.  Apparently, they sang "Jesus Loves Me" a Lot.

After that, Mom and Dad went to conferences to learn how to run junior church better.  They learned about puppets, ventriloquism, balloon animals, and christian magic tricks.  They learned lots of new songs and review games.  Never again would they be caught unprepared.

Dad quickly came to prefer ventriloquism over puppetry.  He wrote lots of his own skits and invented nearly a dozen different characters.  He only bought one dummy in the very beginning.  After that, he and Mom fabricated them, either from scratch or from over-sized stuffed animals.

Mom filled poster pads with songs to sing, and created their most popular match game on index cards, drawing all the artwork herself.

They worked well as a team.  Pretty soon, Dad's ventriloquism got to be so popular that other churches asked him to come and do skits.  Papa Preacher was so pleased with their creativity and hard work that he made Dad the Director of Children's Ministries.

This is what got my parents involved with Saturday morning visitation.  They started running the church van route, so Saturday mornings were spent visiting the roster of kids to see whether they would be riding the next morning.  Us kids had to come along, of course.  It was boring, but we got to have donuts.

That was the beginning of church taking over.  During all of this, Mom and Dad changed.  At the time, we lived near two of Mom's sisters, and, as I said before, they used to be pretty close.  It was common for a bottle of champagne to be shared at family gatherings.  No more at Mom and Dad's house.

They tell the story that, when they were uncertain how to tell the family about their new abstinence from alcoholic beverages, the bottle of champagne exploded all over the living room.  Cleaning up the mess seemed fortuitous to them, though.  God had asserted his opinion about alcohol, and now they weren't afraid to say so.

Another time, my aunt gave Boss an action figure for his birthday.  Unfortunately for him, it looked demonic to Mom and Dad, so they decided it had to be burned.  I remember watching the scowling little face melt in the flames of our fireplace.

These things, plus the duty my parents now felt to witness to our "unsaved" relatives, drove the once close sisters apart.  It wasn't long before they wouldn't have anything to do with us.