A life in letters: Martin Memorial Baptist Church, Carluke

(Best read in conjunction with the artcles on Carluke and on Carluke Gospel Hall.) 

Before moving to Carluke in 1962, our family had attended a Brethren Church in Milngavie, but my parents, I think after some research, decided to join the Martin Memorial Baptist Church in Stewart Street not far from our home. I dubbed this place of worship ‘The church with the smiley minister,’ for so indeed did the Reverend George A. J. Balmer seem to me.  Mum and dad appreciated his character, his faith and his preaching, and my mother enjoyed being able to sharpen up her German by talking to Mrs Balmer, who was Swiss by birth.

As far as I remember I attended both morning and evening services, finding them not exactly riveting, but simply accepting church attendance as ‘what you did’. At some stage however, I began to be disturbed by mentions of the return of Christ, the taking of his followers to be with him in heaven, and the consequences of being ‘left behind’. I tried to block out these sermons by filling my mind with other thoughts, and by building imaginary Lego structures in my head, but still the finger of fear reached  me.

When first we moved to Carluke, I was reluctant to become involved in the church’s children’s ministry, simply through shyness. I remember my parents taking me round to the outside door of the small hall where the Junior Christian Endeavour (CE) was meeting, and all but pushing me into the room.  There I was welcomed by Maggie Simpson and Ethel Cargill, and felt at home. 

I think I enjoyed the CE – all I can remember of the weekly meetings is the singing of Choruses, short songs on a spiritual them, mostly vigorous, although some, such as Climb, climb up sunshine mountain, and He owns the cattle on a thousand hills were gentler and more reflective. I particularly recall one a chorus Sailing home (a heavenly harbour was in prospect) which involved crossing your arms and linking hands with the people sitting on either side of you on the bench, and rocking back and forward simulating a sailing motion while you sang. But small boys particularly enjoyed throwing themselves vigorously into the rocking process with the malign intent of making the person at the end of the seat fall off.  I remember the sense of superiority I felt when we were reading one of the Psalms, each taking one verse, and others in the group read out the word ‘Selah’ when it appeared, which I knew meant simply ‘Pause’ and should be left unspoken. I also remember ‘dooking for apples’ at the Halloween party – at this point, in this church at least, they were no evangelical concerns about celebrating the traditional joys of Halloween.

With regard to parties, I remember debates as to whether ‘kissing games’ should be permitted those for teenager. I think I recall these were in the end forbidden. But I remember that the women’s group, the Woman’s Auxiliary had a particularly cringe-making game at their parties called Poor Pussy, where one of those attending would go down on all fours, put their head on the lap of the others attending one by one, and make cute noises while the person on whose lap the cats head was resting had to say ‘Poor pussy!’ without laughing. If you laughed, you were ‘it’.

I also attended Sunday School, which was held in the sanctuary. After a general time of singing, each class met in its designated area of the pews, marked out with green curtains suspended from removable metal poles which slotted into the pew-tops. The idea was to ensure privacy. My first Sunday School teacher there was Douglas Inglis. I particularly enjoyed his invitation to write up stories of Jesus’ encounters with people as recorded in the gospels as taking place in the town of Capernaum as though for a local newspaper, The Capernaum Chronicle.  Douglas promised to produce an actual edition of this, and I wrote a number of colourful pieces for him, and I was rather disappointed when, perhaps due to lack of participation from others on the class, my pieces were never seen again. I remember the Church organized a ‘Bible examination’ in which we children took part. I think I did quite well, but those of us who were more academic were unfairly disadvantaged.

I moved on to a more senior class, and I found myself with a problem. The Sunday teacher, no doubt following the instructions in his American Sunday School lesson plan, gave us a piece of paper and asked us each to write down when we were ‘converted’, when we ‘became Christians’. The other boys seemed to write freely enough, but I, with no sense that God had ever heard my frequent heavenward cries, wrote simply ‘I am not yet a Christian although I would like me be one.’ I was so upset by this that I refused to see the teacher when he came to the house to visit me, and refused to go back to Sunday School. Although done with the best of intentions, this incident was, for me, a kind of spiritual abuse

For a while I attended another Sunday School run by the church, the ‘Mission Sunday School’ which Douglas’s father John Inglis ran in the wooden pavilion at the Crawforddyke playing fields, but I think I must have returned to the school in the main church, because I have a recollection of a Sunday School Soiree where I worked with a group of other boys to record on a big reel-to-reel tape recorder a commentary for a back-projected filmstrip. I relished the creative and technical challenges this brought, and the engagement of the teacher who was involved: his name, I think was Tom Findlay.

In time ‘the smiley minister’ and his wife left to go to Aberdeen where George was to pastor the Gilcomston Park Baptist Church, and his place was taken by the Rev Charles P. Simpson.  I was baptized and became a member of the church in 1967 – I have written elsewhere about my belief at the time that I was living a lie, and the guilt which that brought me.

When I was too old for the Junior Christian Endeavour, I joined the Senior section. Again I can’t remember much about the weekly meetings or their content, except for ‘Chain prayer’ – which encouraged us to pray briefly, one after the other, and what was called ‘Consecration’ – this took place during the regular meetings about once a month, and gave an opportunity for those present to re-dedicate themselves to God. Often this would be done by finding a verse from the Bible which expressed your commitment, (such as Psalm 31:1 ‘In thee, O Lord, do I put my trust; let me never be ashamed: deliver me in thy righteousness.’) and repeating it out loud during the time set aside for this.  This would have been useful if you were truly seeking God, but I suspect for most of us it was simply an awkward routine, a hoop to jump through. At the very end of each meeting, we'd repeat the 'Miszpah Benediction' from the Bible - I found these two words in themselves had an inherent, healing tranquillity. 'The Lord watch between thee and me, while we are absent the one from the other. (Genesis 31:49)

Regularly over the autumn and winter months, the Senior CE would go ‘on deputation’ to another church somewhere in Lanarkshire. Usually, this involved leading Saturday night tea meetings attended by largely elderly people. Charles Simpson normally went along with us and preached. But we led the part of the event which did not involve tea and buns. We prayed, we sang, we might give a book review, or a testimony when we shared our own conversion story. I was always prepared, with my (as I thought) hypocritical testimony typed up and folded inside the cover of my Authorised Version Bible. (This translation remained standard at that time – there were some evangelical theological concerns about the accuracy of the New English Bible, and though the Good News Bible in its revolutionary down-to-earth style was increasingly being used in evangelical circles (though some people felt that the language wasn’t sufficiently austere for such subject matter) the revolutionary Living Bible and New International Version were still some years ahead.)

And on Sunday evenings after church, during the ministry of Charles Simpson, the young people would meet in the Baptist Manse in Kirkstyle Avenue. These were, as I recall, lighthearted gatherings. I particularly recall Billy McCulloch singing very loudly one evening the 1968 Scaffold hit

We'll drink, drink drink
To Lily the pink, the pink, the pink
The saviour of the human race.
She invented medicinal compound
Most efficacious in every case.

The minister smiled, but my parents, when I told them later, were somewhat disapproving.

Otherwise, my late-1960s memories of the Martin Memorial Baptist Church included the routine of regular services and the occasional very scary sermon; my regular afternoon spent scraping the old Bible-verse posters off the notice board in the church grounds just above the pavement and replacing them with new ones; standing at the desk in the church hall just before the Sunday morning service stamping the ‘Young Worshippers League’ cards which children brought to me to indicate that they had attended church that Sunday; Missionary Meetings, when we’d listen to a speaker from the Baptist Missionary Society or another agency such as the Unevangelised Fields Mission or Worldwide Evangelisation Crusade or watch a film – usually in black and white. These other lands seemed so very different, and so very far away. I held in deep respect the missionaries who ventured to so far for God, and wondered what it would be like to receive ‘the call’ (God-given) to join them. We had a wooden BMS Missionary Box on a table in the living room; Sunday School Soirees when the children took part, and for which I wrote some short Bible plays; film nights when, after a publicity campaign when we’d pushed fliers about the event through letter-boxes in the town, we’d sit in the darkness on a Saturday night listening to the whirr of the projector, and watching a Christian film projected on the screen, usually one produced by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, which you knew would conclude with a character attending a ‘Crusade’ meeting addressed by Graham, coming to the front when the invitation was given, and having their lives transformed. I recall one film which was not produced by the BGEA, and was more thought-proving – a film called Question 7.

This concerned a young Christian in the Soviet Union seeking to live with integrity as a believer while at the same time attempting to blend inconspicuously into the humanistic background. If he wished to progress in the organisation he was a member of, he had to respond in a politically acceptable way to a series of questions about himself. Question 7 was the tough one. If he answered it honestly, he knew he would be ostracised and denied advancement. And yet, if he did not acknowledge his faith, rationalising that he could still practise it in private, could he handle the sense of hypocrisy and of failing God which he would feel? In the end, after much wavering, he chose God rather than personal advancement.

Another film which, despite its being shot in black and white I found more stimulating and genuinely moving than the Billy Graham films probably because it was made with greater artistic and intellectual integrity was a biographical study of the life of Martin Luther. We watched this over two nights in Shotts Baptist Church in the mid-1960s, and this location added an additional frisson to the experience, as it had formerly been a cinema, and the seats tiered down to the choir area where the screen was set up.

In 1970, when I was 18, we left the  Martin Memorial Baptist Church in  and began attending the local Gospel Hall, which stood in a corrugated iron building in the lane between Hamilton Street and Union Street. The move was my parents’ decision, though with my usual lack of personal conviction at that time, I simply agreed with them. The reasons for the move were partly theological, and partly through other issues. I must say that I took a certain delight in phoning my grandfather and telling him that we were ‘coming home’ to the Brethren. Sadly, I had no-one in the Baptist Church whom I would call a friend – due largely to my social ineptness, and my lack of a sense of self-worth.

Shortly after we left, the Extension Fund was used, not as planned to expand the Martin Memorial building, but to move to an otherwise redundant church building in Chapel Street, which became known as Kirkstyle Baptist Church. The Martyn Memorial building was sold for community use. I attended Kirkstyle Baptist Church occasionally – I went out for some months with a young woman from the church – and later, when my parents were living in Crossford and worshipping at Kirkstyle, took several Sunday services there.

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