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I remember what odd mixtures of embarrassment, delight, and mortification came upon me as a child when my father used us children to illustrate his preaching. Unlike Frank, however, my father used us as examples to make a point, not to offer the kind of personal confession Frank made here in front of everyone.

God destroyed Jeroboam even though "the Assyrian kings were far worse," Frank explained, because Jeroboam was "messin' with God's people." By the same token, children are God's property, Frank asserted, yet "the National Education Association says the child belongs to the state, and the state agrees!" The bill permitting children to sue parents was just another step in diminishing parents' ability to act as stewards of the children God has given them.

I soon came to see how readily any passage of scripture could be applied to the problem of building what members saw as a "godly" order of family life, and the forces seen to undermine or interfere with it, like feminism, the "homosexual movement," moral relativism and so on. If members of Shawmut River spoke of the Bible as "our handbook for life," it was, above all, a guide for family life. Under the formula that falling out of fellowship with a spouse is a consequence and sign of being out of fellowship with God, virtually every kind of marital problem could be discussed in these terms.

The church's abiding concern with the problems of family life was closely related to what impressed me most about its distinct atmosphere of worship. It was saturated with the personal, the familiar, the "at-home." Pastor Valenti's willingness to kid his congregation and recognize visitors in public, or to confess his own failures as a parent for everyone to hear, all helped set the proper tone. A familiar, personal atmosphere permeated every aspect of the service: the sentimental and romantic tone of Scott and Sue's anthem; the preference for familial terms of address such as "Brother Phil," "Aunt Margaret," and, simply, "Granny"; the personal idiom of prayer and the absence of any recitation of set-piece creeds or prayers (even the Lord's Prayer) that did not have the stamp of the spontaneous, the idiosyncratic, and the personal.

"The Lord's Prayer is given to us as a model," Phil Strong, an important lay leader, later explained to me, but the Bible says, "Don't pray with vain repetition." God is more interested in dialogue, Phil said, and it was daily dialogue with God that most marked what members had in mind when they spoke of "having a personal relation with Jesus Christ." Such a personal relationship was aptly expressed in the direct, informal, even tender way in which God was addressed in prayers offered aloud that morning.

Shawmut River's worship service was a gathering in which the personal was readily aired, in which the metaphor and mood of "family" prevailed, an atmosphere well served by the injunction Pastor Valenti gave to first-time visitors: "Make yourselves friendly and you will find you have a home here." Shawmut River was not the kind of church you could just walk into one Sunday morning without being introduced. That would be like walking into someone's living room and not being greeted. Once, Pastor Valenti failed to notice a first-time visitor in the crowd and was just beginning his message. Aunt Margaret, sitting next to me in the back row, became visibly agitated and vainly tried to catch his attention. Finally, no longer able to contain herself, she stood up and interrupted him in midstream. "Pastor! Pastor!" she sputtered. "Somebody's here who hasn't been introduced!"

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October (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48