After the guest speaker finished his sermon, I would wait impatiently, along with the rest of the kids in my church youth group, for the song leader to finish leading us in the five, or twenty, verses of “Just As I Am”, and to hear the weekly announcements read, along with all the decisions from the alter call and any other church business that needed taken care of. And when the last Amen was said, I bolted from my pew, my black leather King James Bible – the Rice reference edition – in hand, and headed for the platform. I wanted to be first in line to get the autograph of the special speaker in the front of my bible. And because I grew up in one of the larger churches in the Independent Baptist movement, I heard most of the big speakers of the day and have their signatures to prove it.

When I pick up my old bible today and flip through it, a flood of memories come back to me. It is, first of all, the first study bible I owned. It was given to me by my parents when I was ten years old, after I read through the bible cover-to-cover for the first time, with study notes / editorial comments by my Great Grandfather, John R. Rice. Several of my great uncles served as assistant editors, as well as other professors I knew growing up. And then there are the signatures. When I read through them, I remember points or illustrations from their sermons, or what the last thing was that I heard about them. I think of one preacher/missionary who was one of my favorite speakers to hear, a regular at our church. And who, about a year ago, now in his 70’s, was picked up in a police sting at a public park for soliciting gay sex. Or the pastor from Florida who unfortunately died last year before the 20+ boys and girls who accused him of sexual molestation in the christian school his church ran were able to face him in court. I remember another speaker, a lawyer by profession, who was (and still is) considered one of the great orators of the Fundamentalist movement, and who I thought always had the best stories. To this day, I remember with clarity one of his stories in particular that I found hilarious at the time, and, along with everyone around me, burst out laughing at the punch-line. And whenever it comes to mind today, I’m filled with both a revulsion for my response and a sense of amazement that something so hateful and bigoted would get the response it did from a church.

Reading over the signatures now, the first question that comes to mind is an old one: Does Christianity make one a better person? The answer must be, I think, a resounding “no.” It’s good to remember that Christ never said it would; the verse “come, follow Me so you can be better than your neighbors, so you can look down on everyone around you” isn’t actually found in the Scriptures.