Where To Worship

Life was good in Deland. I was completely on my own, with my new apartment, new job and beautiful new wife. She worked as a keypunch operator. I worked at a sawmill, then later operated a band saw at a place that made transformers. We lived on the edge of the Stetson University campus.

We attended Deland Baptist Temple, a small, autonomous church that was part of the World Baptist Fellowship. Their doctrine seemed to be the same as my Southern Baptist thinking and my wife’s Chapel beliefs. The people were nice. The pastor was friendly. And we fit right in. I taught some Sunday School classes and spoke to the teens. I even drove the church bus, which was actually a van. I picked up a few kids, as well as some older folks who didn’t have rides.

One character that stood out in my mind was an elderly woman from nearby Orange City, who played the piano. She was quite outspoken and opinionated, but we were drawn to her and her husband. Another fellow made a brief appearance one Sunday. He came in barefoot, was friendly in nature, and left a $1,000 check in the offering plate. That raised two questions: 1) What did he want? And 2) Was the check good? Answers: We never saw him again, and I don’t remember what the pastor spent the money on.

So why did we pick this unusual, little church? I think it was because we wanted something different from what we had been raised in. One Wednesday night, however, changed that. I was about ten minutes into my teaching when I saw the pastor and his wife sit down on each side of my wife. Then all three got up and left the room. A few minutes later my wife sat back down, alone, crying.
We left quickly after the service, and I asked her on the way home what had happened. She said that the pastor told her that her baptism was illegitimate because she had not been baptized by an ordained minister in a real church, and that she would need to be re-baptized.

Now, a word about her home church, the Plymouth Brethren. The name comes from a group that met in a home in Plymouth, England in 1830, under the teaching of John Nelson Darby. However, most of the current “assemblies,” as they are called, do not trace themselves back to this group. They see themselves as descended from the original church, always operating in the background of the organized church. Their doctrine is pretty fundamental, in line with most of conservative Christianity. They had no membership, other than the “right hand of fellowship” from the elders, their only official leaders. Their core “meeting” was a one-hour worship service each week, with open “sharing” by the men, hymn singing without musical accompaniment, and concluded with a communion service. Their women wore head coverings and kept silent. They had no pastor or minister, no seminary graduate, but would often employ a “full time worker,” who would preach and visit the sick, and, for his service, would receive one weekly freewill offering per month. An elder or the full time worker could baptize.

So the pastor at Deland Baptist Temple had a dilemma --- by his reckoning. I met with him on a Saturday. The discussion didn’t last long. I cited Ephesians 4:5 (“… one Lord, one faith, one baptism…”), and he returned with a passage on obeying the authority of leaders (Hebrews 13:17). I decided that we should leave. He requested that we not contact others in the church, so as not to cause division. I honored his request, but, in hindsight, have regretted it. While we had no intention of turning the church against the pastor, the truth that led to our departure should have been shared with, at least, those whom we knew well. We received a few phone calls, but quietly responded that it was “the Lord’s will.” Who knows what reasons the pastor gave?

This would be the first of a few run-ins I would have with clergy.

Get Me To The Church On Time

By the time I got the bad news about my future at Stetson U., I had already proposed to my girl. I went through the entire process of meeting her dad --- alone --- and asking for her hand in marriage. He made me wait for what seemed like forever before he came out of the bedroom to receive me. By then I was working for a company that made canning equipment. So I had a job, and I convinced him that I would be finishing school at the earliest opportunity.

He appeared to be more interested in my testimony. He had heard me sing at Campus Life, and I had visited the chapel where he and his family worshiped. I shared the fact that I had given my heart to Jesus, that the Son of God had died for my sins, and that my future wife and I would live the Christian faith. I assured him that I would take care of her. I even threw in the plan to go into full time Christian service (which I still believed). The whole package took about twenty minutes, and I got his approval.

This was in December. We were to be married the following June. We still can’t agree on whose idea it was to get married so soon, but I suspect that I had the greater influence. I gave her the ring the same night that I took her to hear David Wilkerson (The Cross and the Switchblade). I don’t remember anything about his sermon. I was in love, and her ring seemed to cause her hand to float up in the air often so that folks could see it.

We were married in June at her parents’ church, and we honeymooned on the Gulf Coast in a small vacation home loaned to us by a neighbor. The house was on a small canal, a few blocks away from the beach, with a few other houses around it. But there was basically no civilization around it, that being decent stores, restaurants or shopping malls. The closest attraction was Weeki Wachi Springs, where we went to see the “live” mermaids, young women in big fish tails (with bathing suit tops) that could hold their breath under water for a really long time, behind a glass.

Just before we got married, I had changed jobs and started working for a sawmill in Deland, so that we could be near Stetson U., whenever they were ready to take me back. So, following the brief honeymoon, we stopped by Orlando to tear through our wedding gifts, then head up to our apartment, where we would enjoy the newness of married life for the next seven and one-half months.

As devout Christians we were anxious to find a church as soon as possible. She had been brought up in the Plymouth Brethren church (more on that later), and I was of the Southern Baptist faith. We were both ready for a change. Little did we know, however, what Deland Baptist Temple had in store for us.