The Ballad of Every Church That Would Have Us

I need to confess something to the readers of this paper before I go any further. I grew up with a serious drug problem. That's right, I was drug to church twice on Sunday and again every Wednesday night, and drug to Falls Creek every single summer of my life from birth until I turned twenty. My parents taught Sunday school, which meant church wasn't someplace our family visited. It was the place we lived. I say all that with a smile, because it's the truest thing about me, and it's the reason everything else in this story happened at all.

Somewhere in those formative years I got it in my head that the Comanche High School band was the coolest thing going, and one spring break I decided I was going to teach myself bass guitar whether the instrument liked it or not. I sat in my room with that thing until my fingers bled a little and the calluses came in, and by the time school started back I could hold my own in a room full of musicians twice my age. That decision, made mostly out of stubbornness, is the one that set the rest of my teenage years in motion.

Subscribe

Before long I was on the road, playing bass behind John Croy, Allen Wooten, Brenda Petty, and Wanda Jackson, and we played every church that would have us. I mean that literally. Baptist churches, Methodist churches, Native American congregations, Pentecostal churches, Seventh-day Adventist churches — if there was a pulpit and a sound system, we'd been through it at some point. I was a teenager standing in the back with a bass strapped on, watching grown men and women from a dozen different traditions bow their heads the same way, pass the same kind of casserole dish after the service, and worry about the same kind of things. Nobody in those rooms cared what building I'd been in the week before. They just wanted the music to be honest and the message to land, and it was my job to help make that happen.

Looking back on it now, I don't think most teenagers get handed that kind of education, and I didn't fully appreciate it at the time either. I got to watch how a Pentecostal church welcomed a stranger compared to how a Methodist church did it, and how a Native American congregation's sense of hospitality showed up differently than a Seventh-day Adventist congregation's did, and in every single case the answer was the same at the bottom of it. They fed me. They asked about my family. They made sure somebody was keeping an eye on the kid with the bass guitar so he got where he needed to go next. The theology in the sanctuary might have looked different from one Sunday to the next, but the decency in the fellowship hall afterward never did.

Playing bass for that touring circuit meant learning to read a room fast, because no two rooms were alike. A Pentecostal service might run twenty minutes long on the music alone, with the congregation up on its feet the whole time, while a Seventh-day Adventist service kept things quieter and more measured, and a Native American congregation might open with a prayer in a language I didn't speak a word of before the band ever touched a string. I had to learn on the fly which songs worked where, when to hang back and let the piano carry a hymn, and when a congregation wanted the bass turned up loud enough to feel it in your chest. Nobody handed me a manual for any of that. I figured it out the same way you figure out most things worth knowing, by getting it wrong in front of people a few times and paying attention to what worked.

The pace of that life will humble you fast. I still remember one particular weekend that I've never quite been able to explain to anyone who didn't live through it. On a Friday, the Comanche High School band competed in Dallas. I played that competition, got off the field, and got on a bus that same night. We drove through the dark all the way to Oolagah, Oklahoma, and I played a service there Saturday morning. Then we loaded back up, drove across the state, and I played another service in Paola that same evening. I got maybe a handful of hours of sleep before I had to be back at the high school for jazz band practice at six-thirty the next morning, bass in hand, like none of the previous forty-eight hours had happened. I was running on gas station coffee and pure teenage invincibility. Looking back on it now as a father in his late forties, I honestly don't know how my parents let me do it, and I don't know how I survived it, but I wouldn't trade a minute of it.

Eventually the math stopped working. Touring and high school simply do not mix, not really, not if you want to do either one well, and I made the call to pull back from the road. It wasn't an easy decision, because that touring circuit had given me something a lot of teenagers never get: a group of steady, decent adults who kept an eye on me, who expected me to show up sober and on time and playing the right notes, and who treated a kid with a bass guitar like he had something worth contributing. That kind of structure keeps a young person out of a whole lot of trouble, and I've never forgotten it.

Because I was born in the spring, I ended up older than all but one of my classmates, which meant I was one of the first kids in our grade to get a driver's license. A car changes everything for a teenage musician, and it wasn't long after I started driving myself around that a friend's father stopped by the band room after school one day and showed me how to play "House of the Rising Sun" on an electric guitar. I'd spent years holding down the low end on bass, and suddenly here was this whole other world of open chords and volume, and I fell into it headfirst.

Out of that afternoon in the band room came one of the best rock bands I've ever had the pleasure of playing in. It was Jason Darling on bass, William Walker on keys, our drummer Myrtle, and me on guitar, and we would open every single show with a full-throttle cover of a Kansas rock anthem that blew the roof off the place every single time without fail. We got good enough, and loud enough, that we became the first local band ever asked to play at a Comanche basketball game. If I'm being honest with this paper's readers, our real motive wasn't civic pride, it was that playing the game got us in for free, and it doubled as a live practice session in front of a captive crowd. That same rhythm section — Jason, William, our drummer, and me — also served as the backbone of the jazz band, so in a very real sense the same four hands were carrying the melody whether we were in a gymnasium in Comanche or a jazz festival stage somewhere else in the state.

Our drummer's story has always stuck with me, because it says something about where these small-town musical roots can lead a person. He was a transplant to Comanche from Wilson, and after high school he went on to earn a music degree from Oklahoma State University. Today he's a music minister at one of the largest churches in the state of Oklahoma, leading worship for congregations bigger than our entire hometown. I think about that every so often — a kid who showed up as an outsider from another small Oklahoma town, sat behind a drum kit next to the rest of us, and ended up shepherding music for thousands of people every Sunday. Comanche has a way of quietly producing people like that, and we don't always stop to notice.

I tell you all of this ancient band-room history not to be nostalgic, although I'll admit there's plenty of that in it, but because it's the direct root of something I still do as a grown man living a couple thousand miles away in Dunedin, Florida. For a number of years now I've volunteered to run sound and video production for a local event down here called the United Faiths Walk of Peace, and every time I set up a microphone stand or run a cable across a lawn for that event, I feel like that same teenager loading a bass amp into the back of a van for a Wednesday night service in a town I'd never heard of before.

For readers back home who've never heard of it, the United Faiths Walk of Peace is exactly what it sounds like. It's an annual gathering here in Dunedin that brings together people from Islam, Christianity, Judaism, the Baha'i faith, Taoist Tai Chi practice, the Religious Society of Friends, the Church of Scientology, and several other traditions besides, all under one shared afternoon. The event usually opens with a hands-on service project, where people from every one of those different faiths sit shoulder to shoulder assembling emergency care kits for local nonprofits that serve homeless neighbors and families in crisis. From there, the group walks a route of a few miles through town, stopping along the way at a mosque, a synagogue, a handful of churches from different denominations, and other houses of worship, where a leader from that community offers a short reflection on peace from within their own tradition. The walk usually wraps up back at a public park with a community gathering, and some years there's a shared meal afterward where people linger over soup and keep the conversations going that got started out on the sidewalk.

From behind my sound equipment I get a strange bird's-eye view of the whole thing that most of the walkers don't get. I watch a woman in a hijab hand a bottle of water to an older man wearing a cross, and I watch a Buddhist practitioner and a rabbi trade stories about their grandkids while they wait for the next speaker to step up to the microphone. I've mixed audio for imams, priests, rabbis, and Baha'i speakers all on the same afternoon, and every one of them, without exception, has used their few minutes at that microphone to talk about the same handful of things: gratitude, humility, and the responsibility we all carry to look after the people around us. You'd think, listening to a crowd that size representing that many different beliefs, that you'd hear a dozen competing messages. Instead you hear one message, said a dozen different ways.

What strikes me most, running sound on the sidelines of that event year after year, is that nobody up at those stops is trying to convince anybody else that their particular pew has it all figured out and everybody else's doesn't. The whole point of the walk is the opposite of that. It's built around the idea that you don't have to argue somebody out of their beliefs to walk beside them, break bread with them, or help them pack a box of supplies for a family that needs it. You just have to show up and be a decent neighbor. I've heard organizers of that event say, in one way or another, that the day isn't really about cataloguing what makes each faith different. It's about noticing how much is the same underneath all of it: people wanting to raise their kids right, take care of their neighbors, and leave the world a little better than they found it.

If that sounds familiar to you, it should, because it's the same lesson I learned as a teenager riding a bus between Dallas and Oolagah and Paola with a bass guitar across my knees. A Pentecostal congregation and a Seventh-day Adventist congregation and a Native American congregation don't run their services the same way, don't sing the same songs, and don't agree on every point of doctrine you could name. But I watched, week after week, as every one of those rooms full of people cared about the same handful of things that actually matter: their families, their community, and whether the stranger standing in the back with a bass guitar was going to be treated with kindness. He always was. Every single time, in every single denomination, somebody made sure I had a plate of food and a ride if I needed one.

That's the thread running underneath this whole article, and it's the reason I wanted to write it for the paper back home rather than just tell it as a story at Thanksgiving. Whether you're in a band room in Comanche, Oklahoma, or on a sidewalk in Dunedin, Florida, the lesson holds up: the surest way to make a community weaker is to spend your energy deciding who doesn't belong in it. The surest way to make it stronger is to show up for people who don't look, worship, or vote like you do, and to let them show up for you in return. Every member of a community, whether that's a town of a few thousand people in southwest Oklahoma or a coastal city on the Gulf, has the same basic needs. We need to be safe. We need to be fed. We need somebody to notice if we go missing. None of us gets any of that on our own, no matter how self-reliant we like to think we are. We get it because a neighbor who may not share a single one of our beliefs decided we were still worth showing up for.I don't think you have to give up a single conviction you hold to live that out. I certainly haven't given up mine. But I've come to believe that the strength of a town, or a county, or a country, isn't measured by how well the people in it agree with each other. It's measured by how well they take care of each other anyway. I learned that lesson first from a rotating cast of Baptist and Methodist and Pentecostal and Adventist congregations who fed a wandering teenage bass player more casserole than any kid deserves, and I've spent every year since trying to pay it back to whatever community I happen to be standing in. These days that means running a sound board on a Dunedin sidewalk for people of a dozen different faiths who've decided that walking together beats staying apart. Back home, it might mean something else entirely, but the assignment is the same no matter the zip code. We are stronger together than we will ever be alone, and the sooner we act like we believe that, the better off every one of us will be.