Religious experiences: childhood

My first memories of religious activity, and for “religious” read “church”, are of the pre-school section of the Sunday School at the local Baptist Church (Sandringham) near where we lived at Owairaka on the eastern slopes of Mount Albert.

 

The leader of this group was my mother, who had several young ladies to help her. We are singing “I’m H-A-P-P-Y” in my earliest memory; or “Hear the pennies dropping”. Then we are lighting the candles on the wooden birthday cake so that the infant with the birthday this week can blow them out. I remember it as a warm, friendly place with lots of other kids and kindly adults.

 

My family had been staunch Baptist members for several generations on both sides, so we were regular attenders at the morning service and Sunday School, and that meant every Sunday without fail, even on holiday Sundays. My parents attended other Church meetings as well, of course: one of them would go to the evening service at 7 pm, unless one of my grandparents was visiting to baby-sit, so both would go.

 

I remember a very upbeat attitude to Church and Church activities in those days. Apart from anything else it was the main social life for my parents. They would often entertain groups of their Church friends, or of Church-related young people, for evenings at our home; sometimes a Bible Class would meet in our “sitting-room” one evening a week.

 

And my mother and aunt and their friends would play basketball (=netball) on Saturday afternoons for the Baptist team at the courts adjacent to our house. I can remember them all coming home for refreshments after the game.

 

While I was at primary school we regularly entered for the Sunday School examinations, conducted by the Auckland Sunday School Union. Some years we would attend coaching sessions with the minister before the exam. I remember one year when the syllabus covered the life of Joseph from the book of Genesis.

 

So my religious life in those years was largely social, happy and supportive, re-assuring and positive. It included a heavy intellectual emphasis on the words of the Bible, largely of the best stories. It also included an assumption that as Baptist children we were more privileged than children in families where they belonged to other denominations, which hadn’t quite got the right slant on questions of belief.

 

As I grew older I came to understand that an important part of this difference was the Baptist system of Church government. All Baptist members were assumed to have a direct line to God; no priest or other intermediary was needed. So everyone’s opinion was as good as any other’s. Baptist congregations were operated democratically, just like your average voluntary or sporting club in fact. This was always contrasted with the autocratic (Anglican or Roman Catholic), or oligarchic (Presbyterian) systems.

 

 

This basic grounding in democratic principles has been an important part of my inheritance from my ancestors, for many of whom the independence and refusal to conform maintained and strongly argued for by the “Free” churches was fundamental to their religion and politics. My grandfather’s Presidential sermon, when he was

President of the Baptist Union in 1931, was “A New Zealander’s Free Church”.