26 Church 5 – QBC, etc.

Church 5 – QBC, etc.

Following my years at HS-11, Ginny and I attended a Baptist church in the village of Wickford; there I helped paint the church building’s below-roof woodwork, and there reconnected with a Wasp friend who was a member there with his new wife, the pastor’s daughter.  I wanted a sound church with a full schedule of services including Sunday night, so we kept “shopping”.  Quidnessett Baptist Church (QBC) became my model every place I went, even overseas.  I believed the best way to connect with a strong church (again, after the example learned at QBC, with its Evangel Bible and Book Store) was to find one with a good bookstore, so that’s what I did every place I went, especially on visits to Europe and Israel.  When we came there, the pastor and his wife stressed (and demonstrated) the family, and that church was very big in those days.  We had fun events like sweetheart banquets every year in February, men’s and women’s prayer meetings, an annual missions conference and dinner at a local high school, a choir and seasonal concerts every year, and annual retreats for the men and for the women (the men’s retreat in the fall was usually at the woodsy Alton Jones campus of the University of RI in the Exeter woods, and later at a conference center at Sharon MA (one year I joined several men who rode their motorcycles to this event).  The church published a scripture reading program for daily family devotions, which were periodically modeled on the platform up front by various church families, usually with small children.  The pastor and his wife often sang duets or solo music – she was an excellent pianist.

I frequently attended other churches, like the two Baptist churches in Narragansett, West Kingston Baptist, Frenchtown Baptist, the Evangelical Covenant church in East Greenwich, and Friendship and Buttonwoods Gospel Chapel in Warwick.  In all these I made friends with the pastors and leaders; this was very helpful in years to come.  You probably noticed that most of these are Baptist churches; I’d have tried others, but I found none reasonably close to our home.

At that time I affiliated with Belleville Church, a house church outreach of Second Chance.  This was QBC’s first attempt at a church plant; we started as a Bible study, on Tower Hill Road in North Kingstown RI, and incorporated as a church.  Besides the founder/leader and his family we had three elders including those in whose home we met; these were virtually all our attendees.  Our elders (After Ginny and I were married there, I became one when another stepped down) took turns delivering three messages (Worship, Lord’s Table, and “Main”) every Sunday morning; needless to say, we got pretty burned out.

We were influenced by Christians from India, and adopted their style of worship, once convoying to a special service they held in Syracuse NY, where we stayed in the large house of their elder, and shared an “agape” lunch before returning to RI.  It was the coldest I’d ever seen (minus 15 when we got up!), and when we got home I found our pipes frozen; when I opened the valve to the street, our basement flooded while I replaced it with one from the hardware store – hardest day of my life!  The next summer we hosted a “Holy Convocation” at URI with an Indian church-planter, of whom we’d heard for some time.  Meanwhile we continued to lose people as regular attendees left our little flock for local traditional churches.  After the resignation of our host elder, the smaller church, renamed “New Life Christian Fellowship” (NLCF) began meeting in the Mount View home of another member, also of QBC, who was also my original CTI sponsor.  He now worked with his wife’s brother in real estate, and he and his wife had five children, like us.  They left NLCF and sold their house, and all lived for a while in an old farmhouse on Davisville Road, but he and his wife aspired to country living and ultimately settled in NH.  After their departure the church met briefly in our home, and then in the West Warwick RI home of our remaining elder (the one who had resigned, reincarnated) besides me; He and his wife had three children (then teen-agers, now grown); we kept up eating Sunday pot-luck dinners we called “love feasts” in their basement, and I briefly led a home-spun Bible I called “Clean, Shiny”.  They had a cousin, married to another member who was an employee of the American Mathematical Society (not as egregious as one might suppose), and we frequently visited them.  This young man’s grandmother, an Italian woman, assembled costume jewelry with great dexterity.  He and his wife lived in the Thornton village of the town of Johnston RI (where is our older daughter’s apartment), over his uncle’s electric store in an upstairs apartment, where one night they afforded us refuge during a raging hurricane; later at Thanksgiving our family enjoyed a “turkey and meatballs” dinner in their home.  They later moved to the Ozarks, where their younger son was tragically killed in an automobile accident on a rainy road.  Our then host maintained the church corporation for several years (I assume it was a tax advantage), though he and his wife joined Exeter Chapel, and he became an elder there; he eventually retired (an energy consultant), and recently moved with his wife to FL.

I returned with my family to QBC, but left there in the exodus caused when the pastor sought to “west coast-ize” this old New England church, one of whose unique strengths was its inter-married, multigenerational aspect.  This was soon after my mother’s death, which no doubt impacted me deeply.