Thoughts on returning to the church of my youth

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By Thomas M. Parsons

The voice is familiar, but the face isn't right. That is how I often felt this past weekend as I attended the 80th Anniversary of the church I was baptized in as a new believer in Christ forty-five years ago. That church is the First Baptist Church of Lincoln Park, Michigan and those familiar voices coming from the not-so-familiar faces belonged to people I knew then when I was a skinny twenty-year-old young man facing a future then known only to the Lord, but now known mostly to me, although there are still some mysteries yet to be discovered.

There were people there who sang in the choir as I did. There were people there who sat in my first adult Sunday School class where I was the teacher. There were people there who were parents of people I knew as young people. There were former pastors, former youth pastors, former children, former teachers, former young people, and, yes, as one former youth now grown to my age pointed out, "lots of old flames." Well, I was twenty then.

Things change, of course. Faces change, thus my difficulty sometimes in putting faces and voices together. Voices change, but not quite as much as faces. But I noted a peculiar thing. If I concentrated on the eyes of the individual I was talking to, I could begin to see the familiar face of the past. The eyes don't change much over the years, generally speaking. They say the eyes are the windows of the soul. What is inside does tend to become visible through one's eyes.

Circumstances for all of us who were young people then have changed. Then we were young, all of us unmarried, all of us unsure, all of us uncertain about career choices, all of us seeking what God would have us to do. Today we are all, well, old, all of us now being in our early sixties. All of us are or have been married. What was then an uncertain future is now pretty much a certain history. We have all completed, or nearly completed, our careers. All of us have had children and grandchildren, and some of us great grandchildren. All of us now have a pretty good idea of what God's will was for our lives.

But in spite of the changes, and in spite of the unfamiliarity of once so familiar faces, going back to First Baptist was a real blessing. The church is still there, still preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ, still reaching out into the darkness of the community in which it is located, still helping people come to know Jesus, still encouraging young people to consider the claims of Jesus Christ on their lives, still ministering to those about to begin their married lives, still ministering to those who are bringing children into the world, still ministering to those who are sick and dying, still helping the bereaved to say goodbye to a loved one, and still helping believers to anticipate the exciting day when the Lord will return.

Some were missing, of course. Schedules, health, prior commitments, and death all prevented some from attending. But how great it was to reminisce with those who were present, to remember a time when we were young in the Lord, when every day was exciting because it brought us a step closer to knowing what God wanted to do with our lives, and our voices and faces still matched, at least to us. For a few moments as we shared old times, we could at least remember the way it was when we were young and life's challenges yet to be known by us.

God is good. He begins a good work in a young person's life and He sees it through to completion. God is good. He begins a good work in a church's life, and He sees it through to completion.

Some day, all of us, every one of us who were young people at First Baptist Church in Lincoln Park, Michigan in the early 1960's, will meet again and celebrate a grand reunion. None of us will have old faces that don't match our more familiar voices. None of us will have wrinkles, or walk with a limp, or get out of breath walking up a flight of stairs, or have to make regular visits to a doctor. We will be young again, fresh and beautiful and free of the burdens life tends to impose on people. And we will be in the presence of the One Who made it possible by going to Calvary for us.

On that day, the Voice and the Face of He Who died for us will send glory through our entire being, glory which we will return to Him as one voice, one body, one face as His bride.

What a day, glorious day, that will be.

A portion of my autobiography, This Little Life of Mine is about the five years and the many friendships I made at First Baptist. This portion of the writing begins at Chapter 8 "The New Baptist in Town."