North Denver Avenue
It is true that with age I can’t remember squat about what I had for breakfast or your name (my apologies ahead of time), but I recall stuff I hadn’t thought about in decades. I was thinking this morning about my childhood and the church we attended. It was Central Nazarene on North Denver Avenue in Tulsa just north of downtown. The congregation remained there until my high school years when they moved to South Jamestown where they built a building I always thought looked more like a synagogue.
All my childhood and early adolescence was on North Denver. Architecturally it was rather nondescript, stone, rather plain, with no steeple. Inside it had nothing to soak up sound—no carpet, no pew pads.
What are you kidding! A part of sitting there on those hard pews was your penitence for the sins you’d committed that week.
Sound echoed in there big time. If a kid got in trouble during the service and was carried out screaming “don’t spank me! Don’t spank me!” the screams echoed right on into the foyer. The sanctuary doors were like saloon doors (another memory from all the westerns watched as a kid). There would be a BOOM! as the parent hit one of the doors sending it swinging with the one hand they had free, the other dragging the screaming kid.
As if the hard pews and threat of foyer paddlings were not enough, the walls of the sanctuary were like sandpaper—the coarsest of kinds. If you should scrap your hand or elbow against a wall, it nearly warranted a trip to the ER. To this day I’ve never seen another building with such torturous walls—which makes my mind wander again, purposeful? We should have received hazardous pay for attending.
The windows were colored glass, not really stained glass but not clear. That would have been nice to see outside.
Once we were old enough to not have to sit with our parents, teens sat in the back right corner. My parents and those of my friends sat in the opposite back corner. If we got too noisy one parent would lean forward staring our way—the ‘looks could kill version’ snapping their fingers and pointing our way. God forbid should the preacher stop and call us down from the pulpit. We’d have hell to pay after that service. Speaking of preachers, one outstanding service was when Ernest Armstrong got so fired up he actually spit his false teeth across the pulpit. AND, he kept preaching, left the platform, went down and picked them off the floor (he’d missed the altar) and popped them back in.
Am wishing now that I could have seen the look on sister Bertha’s face at that moment. She wasn’t a ‘big Bertha’. Our Bertha was a tall, slender lady with a resonating deep voice. Bertha could have easily sung bass in the choir. She said “AMEN!” umpteen times every service from the front row seat where she always sat.
When we were younger and still seated with our parents we would ‘trace’ the front of the impressions on the Praise and Worship hymnal. There were hymnals that some kid had scribbled on inside (or some really bored adult). Poor kid should his parents see him do that. Then there was the Wednesday night prayer and testimony service. There were weekly reruns by sister so and so or brother what ever. “I was saved and sanctified in 1953 and haven’t sinned since” I honestly heard repeatedly. The older I got, the more I knew where I was going eventually for eternity. Sainthood was a very long stretch for me.
There were positive memories, like Vacation Bible School in the summer. On the sloped lawn on the south side of the church we were served little cups of orange drink and cookies. Good times. There was always a relationship with we Christians and food—Sunday school snacks, pot-lucks, church picnics and ‘dinner on the grounds’. I guess the old saying ‘the way to his heart is via his stomach’ applied at church too.
I took my leave of the Nazarene church during high school ‘escaping’ to University Methodist in Tulsa remaining Methodist while in Stillwater in college. I returned to the ‘synagogue’ to marry. A few months later we moved to Texas for graduate school and my tenure in calvinism at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. I learned early that no one has the market cornered on God so drinking from different wells has improved my perspective broadening my understanding.
That has continued to this day. I’m just drinking a tad more slowly.