God Hath Spoken

by Harris J. Dark

2. Keeping house. The same thing applies to house work. I don’t know much about housekeeping, but I’ve had a chance to observe quite a bit of it as I’ve gone around over the country. And I try to determine the difference between a good housekeeper and just an ordinary housekeeper. I’m convinced that it consists not of one big factor but of a great many details—the arrangement of this little piece of furniture, having the magazines up off the floor, a definite place to keep each of numerous little articles, the spider webs out of that corner, and many other little things. I don’t know what all of them are, but some of you ladies do, and I’m sure you get the point.

3. Leading singing. The same thing is true in church work. I remember sitting and listening to a song director who is very outstanding and who has won national recognition for his ability to direct congregational singing. I tried to determine what made him so successful. I concluded that it was no one big factor, but a lot of little details about the way he directed the service; and I’m sure that Brother Murphy, who is helping us on Thursday nights, will verify this statement.

4. Selecting building site. Let us consider other details of church work. Any one of them by itself is not so terribly important, and I’m sure that I could find someone who would argue with me about any one of them, and say, “Oh, well, after all that doesn’t matter,” but when you take all of them together it does matter. It makes the difference between outstanding success and mere existence. Take for instance the location of the church building. In many instances very poor judgment has been used in selecting building sites.

A certain North Carolina town is still a missionary point, even though there has been a church in it for at least 25 years. The church building is located on a dirty back street. There isn’t a store in the community. No business man would have located one there! Neither is there a school building in the community. No board of education in the world would have put one there. After 25 years in such a location the church is still very small and weak. Very recently they finally decided, after a painful division, to move up town.

I shall not exaggerate in describing their building. The walls were painted, but the overhead was not. There was no rug, no paint, no carpet of any kind on the floor. The benches were such as you cannot find in any country schoolhouse in Davidson County. They were such as you might have found seventy or seventy-five years ago. Hanging on the wall just inside the door there was a mop which was used to clean the floor and over the pulpit a bottle opener with which they unfastened the grape juice each Sunday morning. Over on this side of the building there was a country-store stove with a pipe running all the way across the building and into the wall on the other side. There was a baptistry but no dressing rooms. The people had to come down the aisle to a hole in the floor to be baptized and go up the aisle and to some neighbor’s house to change their clothes. Well, now, are you surprised that this church hasn’t grown?

Down at Kannapolis where I went to hold a meeting, they had a church building on a side street to a side street that got so muddy during the wintertime that they had to discontinue some of their meetings. Every time Brother Flannery was called upon to tell someone how to find the building he would hang his head. I noticed him one night during our tent meeting; he started to announce the location of the building and unconsciously his head went down. He was ashamed of it. And there would be little hope for the work at Kannapolis if they had not decided to remedy that situation. But they’ve already bought two nice lots downtown on which we held the tent meeting and where they will locate a church building as soon as possible.

5. Keeping the building in proper condition. Along with the location of the building is the condition of the building. Literally, I have preached in church buildings where the temperature was about 60° or 55° when the service began and 85° when it closed. People would have on their overcoats when I started to preach and want to pull off their shirts before it was over! Well, you may say that that doesn’t make any difference; but you take one hundred little things like that and it does make a great deal of difference.

The arrangement of the program may look like a small item, but it’s one of those little items, which, taken along with others, makes a big difference. Reports and records of the treasurer and of other workers in the church are important. Our attitude toward strangers when they visit our meetings is significant. That’s one respect in which the Chapel Avenue congregation is outstanding. Your courtesy to strangers has caused much favorable comment.

6. Advertising the work of the church. I’ve known churches to spend three or four hundred dollars to get a preacher, and refuse to spend $25 to get the people there to hear him. Think about that! You know the preacher can’t do any good unless the people are there. I went to a certain city in West Virginia to hold a meeting, and I wrote to them in advance urging them to advertise the meeting. Well, I couldn’t say too much, you know. They’d think I was trying to get them to advertise me. After I arrived I asked them if they’d advertised the meeting. They said, “Oh, yes.” I looked around for a sign but I didn’t see one. The church building was located on a through highway that ran from the North to the South. A streamer across the road would have attracted the attention of everybody who passed. They hadn’t put one up. I looked in the store windows and saw no ads. I saw none anywhere.

I decided to find out whether they had advertised the meeting. It was a small town where everybody is supposed to know what everybody else is doing anyway—only about 1,000 people. I went to the stores and inquired whether a meeting was going on in town. In every store I entered I was thoroughly informed about a Nazarene meeting. One fellow got so enthusiastic that he took me out on the street and showed me the preacher’s house and told me where they were holding the meeting. After they would finish their story I’d always ask if there were any other meetings going on in town. In each case the answer was, “No.”