Pre WW2 CoC

[longdistancerunner]

When I was little (in the 50s) there was still a feeling in the church that politics were outside the building. This was just post WW2/Korea, and many of the men had seen military service, so that was not something that was opposed, but it was also not celebrated. The message from the pulpit was that we were to be 'apart from the world' which meant no church positions on political matters DIRECTLY. Of course, the preaching itself was certainly aligned with/or against various political positions, but very few church men in any position of authority were very obvious about it.

That was always what I heard that politics were out of the building, however in the early 60's we had one preacher who read John Birch anticommunist material in his preaching, he had a very political opinion on that as communists were antiGod. He urged political action, people supporting anticommunist candidates.

[zeek]

"and a Spanish language service - indicating a reasonably sized Hispanic element nowadays."

That is really fascinating. I live in Southeast Ohio now and the two most common churches are Church of Christ and Methodist. I've never seen a Church of Christ advertising a Spanish service.

They just added a FRENCH one, which I TOTALLY fail to understand - maybe Vietnamese? Where in tarn hill does Nashville acquire any significant FRENCH speaking minority with enough to cause a CoC to add FRENCH??

I'm in N Georgia now, and as far as I can tell, the most common small town churches are Baptists and Methodists, with a scattering of Presbyterian and the CoC, of course. But I also see Kingdom Halls, and at least one Society of Friends is nearby (Quakers). Not a lot of LDS, which were everywhere around when I was living in Nevada. Occasionally Roman Catholic - but those tend to be better organized and spaced out further apart.

I just did a bit of quick research and among all the non english languages spoken in Nashville, French is way down the list in like 6th or 7th place. The second most common non English language in Nashville after Spanish is surprising as it is Arabic. I wonder why they haven't developed a service in Arabic??? LOL, I can probably guess. As to why French, my guess would be that some pissy individual pitched a fit about them catering to the "illegals" "flooding our country" So they had to do something to cater to white Europeans.

[B.H.]

I shouldn't do this but...

the local hillbilly institutional minister

More likely an NICOC minister, huh? I wonder if they ever developed any minimum standards /detailed job descriptions for a FT pray-cher. Just so there are no surprise firings in the middle of the night.

But BH, Sister Ivy came from hillbilly culture, so be respectful.

I didn't call anyone hillbilly. BH has been unjustly rebukified.

[Ivy]

I didn't call anyone hillbilly. BH has been unjustly rebukified.

You're right BH. I apologize. That was Shane.

[B.H.]

I didn't call anyone hillbilly. BH has been unjustly rebukified.

You're right BH. I apologize. That was Shane.

It's okay. I wasn't mad or anything I just chuckled that Iv y was going to go "BH!" any minute.