Starting Churches in Motel Bedrooms North of the Mason-Dixon Line
Part Two of Stories as Told to or Experienced by George Bullard
Starting Churches in Motel Bedrooms North of the Mason-Dixon Line
When I was 15 years old, having my Sunday School class meet in a motel bedroom was titillating . . .
. . . having my mother as the teacher took the excitement out of it.
That was the way it was during the first two years of Bux-Mont Baptist Church. Now 58 years old it is located on County Line Road in Hatboro, PA. (See their website HERE.)
We met during our first two years at the George Washington Motor Lodge at the Willow Grove exit of the Pennsylvania Turnpike north of Philadelphia.
Beginning in the fall of 1965 a fellowship group began meeting on Sunday evenings. Attendees were primarily families from Paoli Baptist Church 25 miles to the west, and First Baptist Church of Levittown, PA 20 miles to the east. Both were Southern Baptist churches.
These families lived within about a ten-mile radius of Willow Grove. Were almost all members of one of these two churches. They counted being Southern Baptist (SBC) as part of their heritage.
Only a few non-SBC households were part of the church for the first couple of years.
The Launch
By late fall we were ready to launch Sunday morning Sunday School and worship. We secured the services of Rev. Jack Kelly, an SBC minister whose full-time job was as a regional sales manager for an insurance company.
He was a Godsend to this new area of missional engagement as he served more than a dozen SBC churches as either the first pastor until they could call a full-time pastor, or as an interim pastor.
Our Location
We rented a couple of conference rooms and several bedrooms for the church at the motor lodge. Often housekeeping did not have an opportunity to get all our rooms ready by the time we met on Sunday morning. Church volunteers would arrive early to help clean rooms.
Preschoolers, children, and youth met in bedrooms. Adult classes met in the conference rooms. There was a class for women and one for men. At first one of the classrooms was also where we gathered for worship. Later we rented an additional conference room.
The worship space offered an interesting philosophy of church growth. The conference room where we met could hold about 75 people.
Our congregation was enthusiastic about reaching out to new people until we filled the room. Then we noticed that people stopped inviting people to come to church.
We knew then we had to move to a larger location. Not because we would not grow if we stayed in the motor lodge. But because we knew we would lose our zeal for being inviting and ultimately decline in numbers.
Music Volunteers
Music leadership was a challenge from the beginning. For a piano or organ, we used a small portable non-digital keyboard. It was a box about two-plus feet long and had legs that screwed into the bottom of it.
Volume was regulated by the left knee of the keyboard player putting tension on a lever. The challenge was that the volume lever produced a soft sound with a small amount of tension. With medium tension it produced no sound. With significant tension it was very loud.
It was old and donated by someone, but it was all we had in the first couple of years. My mother and I alternated Sundays playing the keyboard.
We really had no one to lead the singing. Various people did the best they could.
Until . . .
One Sunday a new family showed up with a wife, husband, and four children. They came Sunday morning and Sunday night for worship. Yes, we met morning and evening in those days for worship.
The husband had a very strong and great sounding voice. After evening worship, he was offered a Baptist Hymnal and asked if he would lead singing for us. He accepted and did so for the next four years until the company that transferred him to Philadelphia moved him back to Oklahoma.
Next: The Main Ministry Focus During Those Early Days
See Part One Post: Reflections on Southern Baptist Missions Efforts North of the Mason-Dixon Line
George, were the families from the churches in Paoli and Levittown from the South? In the early years of starting SBC churches in Michigan, the emphasis was on finding Southerners who had migrated to Detroit and other cities for work, many in the auto factories. Stories are told that if someone saw a car with a Southern state license plate in a grocery store parking lot, folks would wait for the owner to return and tell them about a local SBC church. So, the initial outreach was to provide a church that seemed like the one “back home.” Many of our first churches were filled with people from KY, TN, AR, MO, etc..