Talk 6. Elm Park Baptist Church (1951-1958) Part One
Welcome to Talk 6 in our series where I’m reflecting on God’s goodness to me throughout my life. In the last two episodes I have been talking about my experiences at Brentwood School. Today we’re turning to my time at Elm Park Baptist Church.
One great advantage of being a day boy rather than a boarder at Brentwood School was that I was free on Sundays to attend church. It also meant that I came into regular contact with girls, something which was seriously lacking for boys who were boarders.
This, I think, was quite important for me because, as an only child, I had no sisters, but at least through the activities of the local church I was able to form healthy relationships with the opposite sex. In fact I suspect that as a teenager the girls were one of the attractions of going to church! And at Elm Park Baptist there were plenty of activities to choose from. So let’s begin by talking about the church programme.
Church programme
Unlike many churches today where there is only one meeting on a Sunday and another, perhaps, during the week, at our church something was happening every single day of the week. Of course, Sunday was the busiest day. From 10-11am the Boys’ Brigade held their Bible Class. From 11-12 there was the Morning Service.
In the afternoon there was Sunday School from 2.30-3.30 and again from 3.30-4.30, the numbers attending being so great that two separate sessions were necessary. For teenagers there was Bible Class (taught by my father) followed by a discussion group for young people held between 4 and 5pm.
Very often we stayed at church for tea in order to be there for the 6.30 Evening Service which was then followed by a ‘sing-song’ at about 8pm. In fact, apart from going home at lunch time for the traditional Sunday roast prepared by my mother, as a teenager I was at church from 10am to 9pm every Sunday.
During the week, meetings for young people included the Boys’ Brigade, the Girls’ Life Brigade, the Young People’s Fellowship (YPF), and the Youth Club. For adults there was a midweek meeting for Prayer and Bible Study conducted by the Minister, and there were separate men’s meetings and women’s meetings too. All these activities took place on church premises. There were never any home groups in those days. That was something that became popular in the 1970s.
My personal involvement
I was personally involved in most of the activities I’ve just mentioned. This was not the result of any parental coercion. I just wanted to be there and, as I have already mentioned, on Sundays I was at church for almost the whole day. This was from the age of 14 until I was about 17. It was largely through my father’s teaching in Bible Class on Sunday afternoons that I decided to give my life to Jesus – but more of that later.
Dad was a gifted preacher and teacher, and the majority of the thirty or more young people attending Bible Class made decisions for Christ as a result of his ministry. Whenever there was a baptismal service on a Sunday evening, Mum and Dad would invite three or four young people to come for tea after Bible Class and then go on to the service after tea.
Over the years, many of those young people responded to the appeal at the end of the service and walked forward to indicate that they were giving their lives to Jesus and would like to be baptised. One of those young people was my friend, Don Campbell, who emigrated to Australia and, when I last heard from him two or three years ago, he was still attending a Baptist church over there.
Apart from the Bible Class I attended on Sunday afternoons, I also went to the Boys’ Brigade Bible Class every Sunday morning. The Boys’ Brigade was found by Sir William Smith in 1886. If I remember it correctly, its purpose was:
The advancement of Christ’s kingdom among boys, and the promotion of habits of obedience, reverence, discipline, self-respect, and all that tends towards a true Christian manliness.
As well as the Sunday morning Bible Class, our company, which was known as the Second Hornchurch Company of the Boys’ Brigade, held two other meetings each week. Tuesday evenings were dedicated to drill practice, where, after we had been inspected to ensure that we were smartly dressed and our uniforms were being worn correctly, we learned how to stand to attention correctly, to salute the Lieutenants and Captain, and to do basic marching manoeuvres both individually and as company.
When I was seventeen and had been promoted to the rank of sergeant I was awarded the N.C.O’s Proficiency Star after demonstrating that I could give the correct commands for the Company to make these manoeuvres on drill parade.
Of course all this was exactly the same kind of thing the other boys at my school were doing in the CCF and I realise that some might see my being in the Boys’ Brigade as quite inconsistent with my refusal to join the CCF on the grounds that I was a conscientious objector. However, unlike the boys in the CCF, in the BB we were not taught to use military weapons.
On Fridays, time was given for more recreational activities, and opportunity was given to learn to play the bugle or a drum. After a couple of attempts at making the right sound come out of a bugle – it’s by no means as simple as just blowing – I decided it wasn’t for me. This was partly because at the time I found it difficult to sing in tune and I reasoned that if I couldn’t sing properly I probably wouldn’t be able to keep in tune on the bugle either! And sadly all the drums were already allocated to other boys.
But perhaps the best thing about the BB was its annual camp. This took place every year during the school summer holidays. Wherever it was held, it was always within walking distance of the sea.
My first camp was a great adventure for me as, at the age of twelve, I had never been away from home without my parents. It was held in Mudeford on the south coast of England, and I loved it. I went to BB camp on six occasions, Mudeford (1951), Highcliffe in Dorset (1952), Walmer in Kent (1953, ’54, and ’55), and Corton in Suffolk (1956).
It was fun sleeping in a field with six other boys in a tent, each with a straw-filled sack called a paillasse (pronounced pally ass!) as a mattress, your kit bag as a pillow, and only a couple of rough, rather itchy, blankets to keep you warm. If sleeping-bags were invented back then, we’d certainly never heard of them! I say it was fun, and it was, just rather uncomfortable fun.
And, of course, the first night we hardly slept. And when we did finally get to sleep it wasn’t long before we awakened by the musical notes of the bugle playing Reveille. Time to get up, get washed and dressed and go to the toilet. The toilets or ‘latrines’ were just holes in the ground dug the day before by the ‘advance party’ who had travelled down earlier to prepare the camp site, and the washing facilities were just metal bowls of cold water on trestle tables.
Every day was punctuated with a variety of bugle calls summoning us to ‘fall in’ (form a line outside our tents), or telling us that the next meal was ready, and so on, until the final call of the day, which was ‘lights out.’ Apart from mealtimes, activities included getting your tent ready for ‘tent inspection’ each morning, doing chores like peeling potatoes (otherwise known as ‘spud-bashing’), going down to the beach for a supervised swim, leisure activities such as football and cricket, and a certain amount of free time.
There were also various devotional activities, like a service in the marquee on Sunday mornings and, if I remember correctly, a Bible reading and short word from the camp padre after breakfast on other days. But for most boys, the majority of whom did not come from Christian homes, the ‘religious’ bits were something you endured rather than enjoyed in order to be allowed to join in the fun that the other aspects of BB had to offer. In fact, as far as I know, sadly, very few of the fifty boys in the company ever made a decision for Christ.
The benefits for me, however, were inestimable. BB instilled in me the need for personal discipline and loyalty. It gave me the opportunity to mix with boys who were from a very different social background from most of my friends at Brentwood School. It gave me experience in leadership, and it taught me a great deal about how to organise a camp – something that was to prove very valuable when later, in pastoral ministry, I was able year after year to run a Youth Camp for up to 150 teenagers where we saw dozens of young people saved and filled with the Holy Spirit. But that’s a story for a later talk.
Apart from the uniformed organisations like the BB and the GLB (Girls’ Life Brigade, a title later to be abbreviated to Girls’ Brigade), there were three other weekly opportunities for young people to meet together.
I have already mentioned the teenage Bible Class led by my father on Sunday afternoons, but I also attended the YPF (Young People’s Fellowship) on Friday evenings and Youth Club on Saturday evenings.
YPF was an opportunity for young Christians to meet together to worship the Lord, pray, share testimonies, and learn from the Word. There was also plenty of time for discussion, which was something I particularly enjoyed. It took place in what was called the parlour, which even then was a rather old-fashioned term for a lounge. This was at the back of the church building, right next to the kitchen, so conveniently situated for making hot drinks at the end of the meeting.
The Youth Club was primarily intended to be an opportunity for evangelism. Held in the Youth Hall, part of the church’s property but separate from the main building, it provided facilities for table-tennis, snooker, darts etc. and was followed by a fifteen-minute epilogue which included a hymn, a prayer and a short message.
Looking back on it, I think that, although it was valuable as a means of keeping young people off the streets, Youth Club was not an effective tool of evangelism. Most of the forty or so young people who came to it never came to any of the other church activities and I cannot remember any who became Christians as a result of it.
But that is not to say that such activities can never be effective. Perhaps if it had been led by someone with a clear evangelistic gift the results might have been very different. I was later to learn that for effective evangelism there is no substitute for the power of the Holy Spirit. That is what will attract people to Jesus, and that is what will keep them going on with God. But that’s a subject for later.
Next time I’ll be sharing how at Elm Park Baptist I first dedicated my life to Christ, was baptised, became a church member, started to preach, and felt God calling me to become a minister of the Gospel.