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Growing Up in Church
Flannelgraphs, chalktalks, and umpteen verses of "Just As I Am" made a difference—then and now.

by Lyn Cryderman

Church has been a part of Lyn Cryderman's life ever since his earliest years growing up in Winona Lake, Indiana. It could hardly have been any other way since his father, Dale, happened to be a Free Methodist pastor. It's been a wonderful life, says Cryderman, 50, associate publisher at Zondervan Publishing House, whose love of writing included years at LIGHT AND LIFE and CHRISTIANITY TODAY magazines.

As he explains in the introduction to Glory Land, "I have written this book for everyone who remembers all the words to 'Climb, Climb Up Sunshine Mountain' and can still remember the smell of white paste and crayons and damp church basement Sunday school rooms. I believe our years of memorizing Scripture and sitting through object lessons and bringing a friend so that we both won a pencil were a great treasure that needs to be savored and somehow preserved." For those who don't have those memories, you're invited to come along, too.

I don't remember my daddy telling us we were going to be missionaries, but I do remember—even as a four-year-old—packing the 1952 Ford Ranch Wagon. Daddy was going to drive it from Winona Lake, Indiana, to San Francisco, where it would be put inside the same ship that would sail us to Japan.

It was a heady time to be a missionary in Japan. We worked alongside Jake De Shazer, a member of Jimmy Doolittle's 1942 bomb squadron headed for Tokyo. His plane got hit, and Jake and his crew had to parachute into the hands of the enemy. In prison, he made one of those dangerous bargains with God: he promised to preach the gospel the rest of his life if he got out alive. Jake got out after 40 months and promptly returned to love his enemies.

The Japanese paid attention when we set up the flatbed semi-trailer with loudspeakers, microphones, lights, and musical instruments. Who wouldn't?

What a friend we have in Jesus, All our sins and griefs to bear. What a privilege to carry, Everything to God in prayer.

My little brother Rik and I dressed up in kimonos and sang in Japanese. We used Billy Graham's formula: lively music, celebrity testimony, and a gospel sermon, straight from the Bible. Jake De Shazer gave the testimony; Daddy would preach.

"For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God."

"The wages of sin is death."

"If we confess our sin he is faithful and just to forgive us our sin."

"For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son."

"Behold I stand at the door and knock."

When my brother Bill started playing "Just As I Am" on his accordion, waves of Japanese men and women and children streamed toward the trailer where workers led them in the sinner's prayer, gave them a Gospel of John, and the address of a church.

We stayed in Japan for nearly three years, preaching the gospel in open air rallies, in prisons and reformatories, and in the handful of small churches that had been established by a previous generation of missionaries. One day my daddy told us it was time to go back to America.

It was hard to say good-bye to Hako-chan, my best friend for three years. We lived across the alley from each other and spent endless hours catching cicadas, exploring the bamboo forest behind our home, riding our bikes, and sneaking into the underground bomb shelter in a neighbor's home.

At first, we played in silence broken occasionally by laughter since neither of us spoke the other's language. By the time we left Japan, however, both of us had learned enough to communicate.

Once or twice a week, Hako-chan and I would page through Life magazine together. When we came to a picture of something familiar to both of us—say, a cat—he would point and say, "Nekko," and I would respond by saying, "Cat." Then we would turn the pages until we came to another recognizable object, and repeat the words to each other.

One day we were paging through a Bible storybook and we came to the familiar (to me, anyway) picture of Jesus hanging on the cross. I pointed to him and said, "Jesus."

When my friend responded by saying "Jesus," I realized he had no name in his language for Jesus. This was probably the first time he had ever said that name.

I pointed to my heart and said the name of our Savior again, and he did the same. He pointed to his heart and then looked me right in the eye and smiled broadly as he said "Jesus."

I've been back to Japan twice, but only to change planes. If I could go back to Tokyo, I would like to find Hako-chan and ask him if he remembers.

"Stolen Watermelon" and Other Indelible Sunday Impressions
My first pastor, other than my daddy, was a man named Verdon Dunckel, whom everyone called Uncle Dunk. He was the perfect pastor for young and old at our new church in Spring Arbor, Michigan—gregarious, youthful, and fun, but so wise and committed to serving God.

I especially liked Sunday night services. In addition to hymns, we sang gospel choruses like "Love Lifted Me," "Showers of Blessings," and "In My Heart There Rings a Melody." The one song that got everyone going was "Wonderful Grace of Jesus," which had a fast-moving line that the men got to sing all by themselves on the chorus.

Higher than a mountain, sparkling like a fountain, all-sufficient grace for even me.

The other feature that made Sunday nights worth missing "The Wonderful World of Disney" was the testimony service. The song leader announced a song and then said, "Now after this number we're going to give you a chance to tell us what the Lord's done for you lately."

The song would end, and then there would be awkward silence. Then either Orville Fitzgerald, the town barber, or Pop Young, a local contractor, would break the ice. If we were lucky, someone with a real bad "sin story" would take over next. They would usually be people who had just gotten saved recently and held us captive mostly with the descriptions of how sinful they had actually been.

In most towns and even small cities, it was hard to find a business that stayed open on Sundays. Even if you weren't a Christian, you were forced to slow down on Sunday if only because just about everybody else did.

But I didn't want to slow down, which is probably why I liked Sunday school so much.

Quick! Name the two most common visual aids in Sunday school in the 1950s. Scene-o-felt and chalktalks.

If you haven't heard a story with a Scene-o-felt (also called flannelgraphs), you have not really heard a story. A Scene-o-felt involved colorful pieces of flannel with scenes and characters from a particular Bible story oil-painted on them. The storyteller would begin with a flannel-covered board about three feet by five feet, mounted on an easel.

As she started with "One day a long time ago … ," she placed a bright blue flannel sky on the top half of the board, followed by a flannel sun in the corner and some billowy white flannel clouds scattered around the sky. She continued telling the story as she added a flannel meadow, a flannel shed, and a flannel tree, and then, with drama to capture a nine-year-old's attention, she would build a flannel pigpen with flannel pigs and flannel corn husks and finally, a forlorn and dirty flannel Prodigal Son.

To change scenes, she would deftly remove the pigpen and lay down a flannel path with a flannel house on the horizon and a friendly looking flannel father embracing the flannel son. I remember this parable not from my reading of it in the Bible but from Mrs. Munn's Scene-o-felt.

Sometimes the Scene-o-felt ran into trouble. Like the time our teacher told the most moving Crucifixion story around a lavishly built flannel scene of Jesus on a flannel cross between two flannel thieves. Just as she repeated the familiar plea of Jesus to forgive those who had done this, he fell off the cross. Not missing a beat, she used the mishap to artfully segue into the Resurrection.

Chalktalks were a more artistic version of the Scene-o-felt. The person telling the story had to be at least a passable artist. The concept was the same—tell a story and illustrate it at the same time. But the chalktalk had one feature that never failed to elicit a collective swoon from the audience.

Once the picture was fully drawn, the houselights would go down and with a flourish the artist would flip the switch on a little light placed just above his pad of newsprint. The colors would jump with magic!

After the story we were dismissed to our classrooms—the one place in church we knew we could always expect to have fun. Occasionally, our teachers treated us with a filmstrip.

I keep going to church because I
need what it gives me. A family. A
sense of belonging to something so
big it can't be contained. A holy
place where covenants are made.

There were a number of reasons why I try not to sin, but probably the most compelling deterrent to bad behavior is the filmstrip, "The Stolen Watermelon." It was a simple story, but seeing it one frame at a time in living color left an indelible impression on me.

A mom brings home a watermelon from the fruit stand and sets it on the kitchen counter. She tells her son that she is saving it and that he's not supposed to eat it. She leaves and he's sorely tempted.

He decides he would be doing his mother a favor if he cut out a small piece just to make sure it was ripe. It tasted so good that he cut a nice big slice, then another one.

Realizing what he had done, he went out behind the garage and buried the evidence.

When his mom found the watermelon missing, she asked him if he knew where it was. "No," he lied, and she believed him, so of course he felt awful.

A few days later his mother summoned him to the back of the garage where the watermelon seeds had sprouted. He confessed and was forgiven.

Thanks to that filmstrip, I will never forget or question the Bible verse that appeared on the final frame: "Be sure your sin will find you out" (Num. 32:23, KJV).

Revival Time, Ready or Not
At least twice a year, whether we needed it or not, our church had a revival meeting. Usually, we needed it.

Revivals gave us all a chance to think deeply about our relationship to Jesus and then do something about it if something needed to be done.

Imagine being 15 years old. You're trying your best to live a godly life in a pagan high school. You go to church and don't smoke or go to parties, and you still get C's in math and never get the cool girls to notice you. So you arrive at church feeling lower than a snake's belly and within three minutes after finding your seat with the rest of the youth group, the entire church erupts in:

I serve a risen Savior, he's in the world today.
I know that he is living, whatever men may say.
I see his hand of mercy, I hear his voice of cheer.

Just at this moment in your life when you needed something—some reminder that you were not alone on this journey to a place you couldn't see led by a man you knew only from a very long book with thin pages and strange language …

He's always near.

You are on your way back up the mountain, and the next song only makes the path seem easier:

I know not why God's wondrous grace, to me he hath made known,
Nor why, unworthy, Christ in love redeemed me for his own.

The more you sang, the better you felt about your faith. Let all your buddies make fun of you for going to church. It didn't matter because …

I have decided to follow Jesus, I have decided to follow Jesus, I have decided to follow Jesus. No turning back, no turning back.

So what if you couldn't go to movies or play cards or dance? What difference did it make if you missed a pick-up game of basketball on a Sunday. It was the price you paid for a greater reward.

When we all get to heaven, what a day of rejoicing that will be.
When we all see Jesus, we'll sing and shout the victory!

The preaching at a revival was unlike the sermons you heard at regular church. The evangelist started kind of low key, telling us about the man who was a drunkard who beat his wife, and then found a gospel tract on the floor of the factory where he worked and knelt right there to accept Jesus and returned home a model father and husband.

Then he moved on to the soldier who wasn't a Christian but kept a New Testament in his shirt pocket anyway and one day in battle took a shell right to the heart but lived to tell about it because the bullet only went partly through the New Testament, miraculously landing right on John 3:16! Each story took about 15 minutes to tell, spun with great detail and drama. I never fully believed all of them, but they got my attention.

After about 45 minutes of stories, the preacher closed his Bible. The only thing standing between you and eternity was the invitation. The soft and lonesome strains of a familiar tune settled over the sanctuary.

Just as I am, without one plea, but that thy blood was shed for me.

Sometimes only a few—or even no one—went forward, even after four verses of "Just As I Am." The evangelist would tap the song leader on the shoulder, who would back away from the pulpit to let him give it another try.

"You know, the devil would like nothing more than for me to close with a word of prayer and send you all home, but I can't do that and call myself a minister of the Gospel. I know there's at least one person in this sanctuary who can feel Jesus knocking at his heart's door, so we're going to sing another hymn."

Even as he was speaking, the organist deftly modulated from "Just As I Am" to one of the most persuasive invitational songs ever written:

Softly and tenderly Jesus is calling, calling for you and for me;
See on the portals he's waiting and watching, watching for you and for me.

When a revival meeting was approaching, I took a serious spiritual inventory and tried to clean up every sin that I knew about. I prayed as earnestly as I could, confessing those sins to Jesus and asking him to forgive me. Not so much because I wanted forgiveness but because I didn't want to come under conviction when the invitation was given at next week's revival. Just once I wanted to sit through "I Surrender All" knowing that I'd already done it.

Why I Still Go to Church
I have been alive for nearly 2,600 Sundays. My best guess is that I have been in church on at least 2,550 of those.

Why?

One Sunday during the sermon, I started to list the reasons why, after spending my entire lifetime going to church, I still do it.

Church has kept me married. We took our vows in front of some of the very saints who had kept me from running in the sanctuary. Their presence in our lives strengthens our resolve to keep promises we made to each other.

It was in church where we took each of our babies to be dedicated. As they mature into adults and worry us with the choices they make, we place our trust in that covenant between the church and our children.

The church gave us nurseries and surrogate grandmas to hold our babies. It taught each of our kids the motions to "Climb, Climb Up Sunshine Mountain" and their first Bible verse: "Let the little children come unto me."

The church made them stars every Christmas in bathrobe dramas. And it was the church that gave them Sunday school teachers who introduced each of them to Jesus as their Savior.

When a small tumor sent my wife to an overnight stay in the hospital for surgery, it was the church that brought me a meal and upheld us with a "prayer chain."

I keep going to church because I need what it gives me. A family. A sense of belonging to something so big it can't be contained. A holy place where covenants are made.

Going to church gives me a small and imperfect view of heaven, and despite all the silliness that sometimes goes on, I like what I see.

In the church of my youth, Guy Priest pulled the heavy rope that rang the bell calling us all inside to worship. He was a shy older man who seldom spoke and was slowed by a severe limp.

After every church service Guy would hobble between the pews, stooping to retrieve a bulletin or Sunday school paper, straighten the hymnals, and collect a Bible someone left behind. I don't ever recall talking to him, except for one time when I was a sophomore in high school.

After a Sunday evening service I was about to walk home when I realized I was missing my Bible. I slipped back into the sanctuary to find it. The place was empty except for Guy Priest, who greeted me as I walked in. Then he limped over to the end of another pew and picked up my Bible.

"Thanks, Mr. Priest," I said. Feeling a little awkward that these were the only words I'd ever spoken to him in all the time I'd known him, I thought of a question. "Mr. Priest, why do you always stay after church and clean it up?"

"Oh, I guess I just like getting the church ready."

To him, the sanctuary was a holy place where people got real serious with God. It was a tabernacle of praise on Sunday mornings when ordinary people from all walks of life lifted their voices to sing about a mighty fortress and love divine. It was a hospital for the sinsick and a way station for the weary. It was a lighthouse for the lost and a pillar of fire for the faithful. He had seen teenagers get saved and babies dedicated and missionaries commissioned there.

Every sermon, every Sunday school lesson, every hymn helps get us ready to meet the Bridegroom. I'm preparing for that moment when our Lord opens his arms wide and calls me by name and says those words he has waited all his life to say to me.

"Welcome Home."

Copyright © 1999 by the author or Christianity Today International/Today's Christian magazine (formerly Christian Reader).
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