Faith, Folklore, and Friends

I recently visited a congregation that had a new baptistery; a gleaming tank of temperature-controlled chlorinated water which could be changed as needed.  Well, I thought, they no longer have to wait until summer to be baptized, which is bound to be a good thing. Before long, I was  nostalgically  thinking about some baptisms that I witnessed in my long-gone childhood... We were not a church-going family on a regular basis, but we did go occasionally for strictly social purposes. I had no concept of salvation; church to me was a totally fun event that was temporarily interrupted by a sermon. Most of this church-going took place in the summer, when annual revival meetings where held. This summer-time holiness tradition began before the days of cars and pickup trucks, when people walked or rode wagons to church. It had to be after the crops were laid by. In the little church we randomly attended, you didn't mess with tradition, so the revival meeting occurred on t...

Old church buildings, including the Waterloo United  Methodist Church shown here, often have two doors at the  entrance.  More than a century ago, when this church house  was built, it was the custom for women and men to enter different doors and sit on different sides of the building. Some say it was an "appreciation of the natural order", while others say it was a safeguard against temptation. I'm thinking they probably appreciated having two sets of doors to keep open during the humid Alabama summers before air conditioning was invented.