Redlands Alliance Church

June 4, 2007

I spent a large portion of my life in the Redlands Alliance Church. Ronald Reagan was president when my family moved to Redlands. I was in the 7th grade. Twice on Sunday, in the morning and then again in the evening, my father delivered a sermon up there at the pulpit. John Browning played the piano over there on the left. I invariably sat somewhere on the right. I attended regularly until I left for college.

This last weekend I was back in Southern California for my sister's wedding.. and on Sunday we were back in church. It is interesting to return to a place after years away from it. Memories come rushing back.. certain people that are now gone appear in my mind. This time I was remembering old Henry Voss and his impassioned soulful prayers standing before the communion table. Or Ross Edwards and his sometimes off-key and off-time song hymn leading.

This may well have been the last time I will ever sit through a service at the Redlands Alliance Church. My father was preaching again, but this was only a guest appearance since he has now officially retired. His message was a warning about the decline of the church that he fears is taking place in America today. I disagreed strongly with the cultural critique that he was delivering, but I can readily imagine how different churches.. and Evangelicalism in general.. appear to him. The megachurch was not around back then.. and my father has never been a Wal-Mart kind of preacher. His was a message that fit perfectly into a small church, but not one that meshed with rock choruses, Starbucks in the lobby, or James Dobson style political action. It has been all about the soul and salvation.. all the time.

There is Mike in the tan shirt to the left. His daughter Allison is jumping round in the foreground. Mike and I were best friends throughout high school and the early years of college. A little while after I took this photo Allison asked where Mike and I had met.. and I could not remember exactly where. But it was certainly somewhere here in the Redlands Alliance Church. It was a friendship that spread beyond the confines of the church to school and other places.. in fact at first neither of us had any particular interest in religion. That friendship was another gift that came from this old church.

I have made this point before, but it is worth re-stating that one important thing I got from attending the Redlands Alliance Church is a sense of the wider world. Every year we had a missionary conference and individuals and families who worked in Africa, Asia, South America, or even Europe came and delivered their slide show to us. It was not like some Discovery Channel program where only the amazing and colorful aspects of a country were shown. We got a pretty good view of daily life in different countries. My first trip abroad (a six week trip to Chile) was in large part funded by people in the Redlands Alliance Church who wanted me to experience missions.

Looking around the interior of the Redlands Alliance Church I see many changes. In fact, few current elements of the interior of the sanctuary were present when we first arrived. The wooden pulpit and communion table go back to that time. So do the wooden pews (but not the cushions). Almost everything else has been changed since then. But this decorative map of the world is definitely an original element.. and I am glad it has remained on the wall.

The interior would be fun to excavate.. to figure out the changes and ask why they occurred. But so many of the people who could remember information like that are slipping away. And so like everything else this will be a history that no one tells. But we here at Old Roads are committed to bringing you bits of micro-histories.. along with the broadest possible theoretical lens.