Tuesday, November 02, 2021

November 2

 



  I grew up in one of those fundamentalist Christian churches where we called one another 'brother' and 'sister'. I really liked that. (Still do.) Even the preacher was called 'brother'. The Bible says "call no man on earth your father" - so that was our justification for not having priests. We extrapolated that to include terms like 'reverend' -- only God is to be revered, not any human person. We didn't even call them pastors. Being 'pastors' or 'shepherds' was properly the responsibility of the 'elders' - a group of men who ran the congregation by committee, and who technically outranked the preacher, in that they could hire and/or fire him. 
  A preacher was just a preacher. Well, to be honest, a lot of them did have other full-time jobs besides preaching a sermon on Sunday and teaching a class at Wednesday evening Bible study. But even the ones for whom church was their full time job were still not known by any special title. In this photograph are two men who were, I assume, Church of Christ preachers. I don't remember either of them, so I don't know specifically which congregation they might have been associated with or anything else about them. But I have their picture -- two copies of it -- so somebody in the family knew them from somewhere.

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