Yeh, i’m a Methodist by birth and by somewhere around 500, give or take a couple of hundred, folks raising me in the First United Methodist Church, previously the First Methodist Church South, nee First Methodist Church in Lebanon, Tennessee. Sean captured some precious memories for me here, even though our old church buildings with the three-sections of arched pews in the sanctuary and a balcony in the back are long gone. Hartford, Alabama’s Methodist Church and mine of yore in Lebanon are/were a bit different in some respects but very much alike in much of what Sean describes in his daily post, and reading it brought back the memories, many memories.

When i go home, which is far, far too infrequent, i go into the new church sanctuary –i haven’t yet been in the newly renovated sanctuary. The new and the newer versions on West Main are bigger and whiter and more majestic than that old one on East Main and have with electronics to aid the hearing impaired and abet not opening the Cokesbury hymnal to sing those hymns, and new modern stained glass windows i don’t particularly care for, and the revised ways of singing and voicing the liturgy. 

But when the hymn is over, we all still end it with a heartfelt “Aaaaaaaaahhhhhhh-meennnnnnnnn.”