I have been in the same Sunday school class for just over 50 years. We came from Jones Memorial United Methodist Church in Forest Park, where we had been for five years, coming there from Ohio.
In Fayetteville the Paul Nix family first brought us to Fayetteville United Methodist and I’m still there. We had always been Methodists and my husband’s brother was a Methodist minister. One of my brother-in-law’s sons, however, now belongs to a synagogue – but I digress.
The Fellowship Class were mostly in our 30s and the class was located on the third floor.
Each 15 years our class, due to advancing years, was located another floor down, and after 50 years we’re mostly in our 80s and located on the ground floor – no further explanation is needed here.
The class has always had four different teachers for each different week of the month and I’m privileged to say I was the fourth Sunday teacher for 40 years.
It has always been a giving class, and I’m not just referring to money.
Our time and talents have long sustained not only our relationship to the church, but to the community has a whole. We have been happy to take you to a doctor, to sit and read to you, to pick you up to attend a funeral or bring you to church. In my case, when I had a cast on my leg from my toes to above my knee, they brought me food.
My son had been baptized in Forest Park, but our daughter was born in Fayetteville and baptized in this church.
One Saturday evening my teenage son borrowed my car to visit with friends in Atlanta. When my daughter and I came out that Sunday morning to go to church, the passenger side was slightly bashed in and I couldn’t even open the door to get in – but I digress.
There were five families who came the same spring/summer from Jones Memorial to Fayette County. Three of us are still here. I couldn’t think of the name of that church so I called them, and only one could remember. That’s what aging 50 years will do for you.
Here’s something you may not know: John Wesley is the preacher who started the “Methodist” church in the mid-1700s and for originating the idea of Sunday schools. Bet you some of you Baptists and Presbyterians didn’t know that …
