Triumphant Entry
It would appear that the silly season has set in. I have noted this week when I drive into downtown Greater Metropolitan Arab that a crew of painters are industriously – as industrious as one can be on days that top 100 degrees Fahrenheit as often as not – spraying the buildings of the First Baptist Church of GMA.
The silliness comes in that, first, the buildings of the First Baptist Church are made of fine red brick. Hence the act of painting them is not only questionable but probably silliness. It is rather a simple matter to spray pain on a brick edifice. Removing that paint in future is quite another matter. Hence the quotient of silliness on this paining pogrom, one wonders how much money the church is spending on this project and if they have contemplated, much less considered, the cost of reversing the act.
Based on prior experience with the interior politics of baptist churches, which incidentally are radically different from the exterior politics of baptist churches, considerably more different than the interior and exterior ballistics of guns and rockets and also more destructive, I can offer with reasonable confidence that the undertaking has been effected without any rational, reasonable, or even adult assessment of future considerations and probably of current considerations. Little has been written about the contribution to the current banking mess of the asolvent economics of churches, especially here in the Old Confederacy. This asolvency is particularly relevant with Baptists who have no self control when it comes to purchasing instruments of perceived faith and no ability to effect political compromise. Hence the political differences between those who spendthrift plan is in effect and those whose spendthrift plan is in abeyance do not find mediation or negotiation and eventually the strain becomes so great that the congregation splits, the “ins” keeping the building, grounds, and debt, and the “outs” marching off to generate their own bulidngs, grounds, and debt.
This division has a mean time of 2.5 years, so that if a congregation takes on a ten year mortgage, the capacity of the congregation to retire the mortgage will be halved (approximately) three of four times during the duration of the mortgage. Calculation of the probability of default is left as an exercise to the reader.
This calamity is somewhat less to be expected with the First Baptist Church of GMA. For GMA, this church is as high church as it gets. One may motor down the mountain to Guntersville to find Catholics or Episcopalians or Anglicans, but here in Arab we have the rather skewed situation where the baptists of this church are the conservatives of the community. As a result there is less hot headedness; the politics are no less intense, just that the staid parishioners are better attuned to abiding that tension while awaiting their turn. Make no mistake, this is no roisterous bunch of foot washing, serpent considering, back slapping baptists like one can find in other congregations specking Greater Metropolitan Arab like acne pustiles on a teenage chocolate addict’s countenance. In this congregation body contact is limited to women’s air hugs, designed to leave cosmetics untouched, and men’s firm hand shakes. This is not a congregation to have boisterous outdoor games at its vacation bible shul, nor revival services outdoors. No, this is a massive hulk of a temple and it will be used for all purposes and they will be worshipful.
But the selection of a pain color that can best be described as an equal combination of the battleship grau of the Kriegsmarine and “baby shit brown”?
The invited comparisons and comments are left as exercises to the reader.
