Now & Then: Church gatherings often involved fellowship meals

Wednesday, March 31, 2010

— Some of my early memories are of going to church. My dad and mother met at church in Pea Ridge in the 1930s, when Mother was working for the Ezra Ricketts family. Our family was pretty regular in church and Sunday school attendance.

It has long been common for church services to be held at 11 o’clock on Sunday morning, with Sunday School at 10. I think largely that was because farm families needed to finish the morning chores, milking the cows, feeding the cows and chickens, putting the dairy cows out to pasture for the day, before going to church and Sunday School. We always had every morning farm chores, but it didn’t usually keep us from church.

When I was young, the town of Pea Ridge was much smaller than it is today. There were four churches: the Presbyterian, the Methodist, the Baptist and the Church of Christ. In those days, you could say that the churches were family life centers, but not like family life centers today.

The churches were centers of family life in that they brought families together in worship, fellowship and work. We didn’t know “family life centers” in the sense of large activity centers in those days. Many times a church would have twoor three generations of a family as members of the congregation. It was common to go to church where your grandparents attended. My granddad, Scott Nichols, was the song leader at our church, and my Grandmother Ellen was very active in the Ladies Society, then called the Women’s Society of Christian Service, or WSCS. The pianist at church was sometimes my mother, and sometimes Winnie Martin.

Winnie’s niece, Martha Lee Martin, was my first Sunday School teacher; at least the first I remember.

In church back then, the men and women often sat apart. The men, especially the older men, usually sat up front on the left at our church, and the older ladies sat up front on the right. There were separate Sunday School classes for the men and the women. In those days, we had at least four classes in the pews in the same room; the older folks classes up front, the youth class in the vestibule or in the rear pews on the right and the younger adult class in the rear pews on the left. The young adult class was taught by Orville Crabtree, or sometimes by my dad. It is kind of amazing that we had so much going in the one big room back then. Today each Sunday School class has its own room.

I think during the war years of the 1940s, some of the customs of having men and boys and women and girls in separate classes began to change, and in our church the young married couples were having co-ed Sunday School classes, and we kids had boys and girls together.

The early churches in Pea Ridge had been mostly one-room church houses. By the time I was a little boy, our church had a little annex room for the nursery class and, after W.W. II, we added a primary classroom, a small fellowship hall, a junior classroom and a tiny kitchen. It was in the 1950s that many of our churches began to have fellowship halls and educational annexes. Even though we didn’t have fellowship halls with dining areas in the earlier years, that didn’t mean that we didn’t have dinners.

Church dinners were normally held outside under the shade trees. The men and boys would set up tables outside, either bringing tables from home or setting up make-shift tables with boards and tall saw horses. Then, oilcloth table cloths would be laid over them, and the food would be laid out.

As I recall it, even during the lean years of W.W.II, during the early 1940s, there was always plenty of food on the tables for dinner together. We were a little short on things like cake, because sugar was in short supply and rationed.

In some communities in the 1940s and 1950s, the movement to add fellowship halls to the church buildings was controversial. Some people thought it was irreverent to be eating in a room attached to the church building.

So some churches built fellowship halls and educational wings set at a distance from the building where worship services were held. This always seemed a little strange to me, since Jesus asked people to remember him by eating bread and drinking the fruit of the vine;

and in the earliest church in the book of Acts and in the Corinthian letters the gatherings for meals were very much part of the church’s meeting together in the Lord’s name. Most of the Pea Ridge churches built fellowship halls in basements or as attached rooms.

◊◊◊

Jerry Nichols, a native of Pea Ridge, is a retired Methodist minister with a passion for history. He is vice president of the Pea Ridge Historical Society.

He can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected], or call 621-1621.

Church, Pages 5 on 03/31/2010