My mother took her 12 children to church. The fact that my father didn’t go never deterred her. To her credit, she never made church-going boring.
One summer we attended Sunday school at Wann, in the one-room school house where I went to school on weekdays.
In fact Mom started the Sunday school. She was superintendent and I remember teaching the little kids. I must have only been around 12 years old when I gathered the children round me and told them stories of David and Goliath, and Jonah being swallowed by a whale, and other Bible accounts. We sang choruses such as “Climbing Jacob’s Ladder” and “This Little Light of Mine.”
Every time we’d come home from church, though my father never went, he’d quiz us. “What did the preacher preach on today?” “What Bible story did you hear about?” We knew we had better listen good, so we could tell Papa what we’d learned.
Later, in the fall, we went to a Pentecostal church.
Two of my brothers became Assembly of God preachers. Once my mother took us to a liberal church whose pastor didn’t believe in hell. We only went there once.
A neighbor invited us teenage kids to a youth study once at a Baptist church. Three of us girls and my mother eventually became Baptists, but I don’t think it was because of those nightly meetings.
When we were young, with my dad’s endorsement, many of us kids attended a Holiness school and church. My youngest sister later embraced that faith.
We loved joining any congregation that had all day singing and dinner on the grounds. My mother would fry chickens and bake pies and pile us kids into the back of our old banged up pickup. These events were our favorites and were usually held in rural one-room schoolhouses. My roots in Christianity came from those old gospel songs I listened to, such as “I’ll Fly Away,” “I’ll Meet You In The Morning” and “The Jericho Road.” Even today I have trouble worshipping with this new modern, contemporary music.
Most nights Mom would gather us around her in the sitting room and read a chapter from the Bible.
We didn’t have any couch, just one rocker, a piano, a bookcase and a library table, so us kids would fight over who got to sit on the piano bench. It would hold about four of us and the rest would have to sit on the floor. I didn’t especially appreciate that Bible-reading at the time, but I realize now that Mom gave us a great gift, doing all she could to give her children a Christian upbringing, translating her beliefs and values to us. I’ve never regretted or resented that.
No, it wasn’t a perfect “religious” upbringing, but all of us were influenced to follow that path, gaining faith which we passed on to our children and, surprisingly, to the following generations.
Maybe there’s something to that verse of Scripture that says “Train up a child in the way he should go;
and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” (Proverbs 22:6).
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Editor’s note: Marie Wiggin Putman, and her husband, Jerry, live in Little Flock. A native of Benton County, she writes a monthly column for the Westside Eagle Observer. She and her husband are members of the Pea Ridge Historical Society.
Opinion, Pages 4 on 05/08/2013