Camp meetings and a flood of preaching memories

On a recent one-day grand tour of the Ozark hills over yonder where I grew up, I tried to explain to my friend Mark about the "camp meetings" that were held in Des Arc nearly a century ago.

As we pulled off Highway 49 where Johnny Collier had a service station with ice-cold soda pop -- the coldest in the world, I had Mark pull over so we could look at an area covered with brush and weeds.

"That's where the camp meetings were held," I said as I tried to help him visualize the past.

Camp meetings were religious gatherings. In addition to church worship services on Sunday mornings and Sunday evenings plus Wednesday-evening prayer meetings, most churches in and around my favorite hometown had occasional week-long evangelistic gatherings known as revivals. Guest preachers would be imported for revivals, which would always include at least one pack-a-pew night.

Evangelists were like touring stand-up performers. Some were really, really good. Some were funny. Some were not. One of the favorites in that part of the Christian world was Brother Burnell Lewis. He knew more jokes -- clean jokes that you could tell in church -- than anyone alive. I was sure of that. Brother Burnell would have us holding our aching sides as our laughter was sobered by the invitation hymn that called us to an eternity of salvation.

Rural churches often held their revivals outdoors on hot summer nights. These preaching services would be held in brush arbors. Before the revival started farmers and loggers in the vicinity of Shady Nook Church would gather saplings and leafy limbs to build the brush arbor. The men would carry pews outdoors to the arbor, and the pulpit too. They also lit kerosene lanterns and hung them in the arbor.

Camp meetings were a lot like brush-arbor revivals, only on steroids.

Instead of a temporary arbor that would be torn down after the revival, camp meetings were covered by a sturdy open-air pavilion that protected worshipers from daytime sun and nighttime rain.

The "camp" part of camp meetings was just that. The camp meetings in Des Arc would draw folks from miles and miles around. I'm sure some of the participants arrived by train and some by horse-drawn wagons and maybe a few by Model T. But the plain fact was that most folks traveled -- walked -- far enough from home that it was impractical to go home every night after the preaching. So they literally camped around the pavilion, which was called a tabernacle.

My mother remembers walking, with her mother and siblings, several miles from their home in the woods near Brunot to the camp meeting in Des Arc. She and her sisters would go barefoot and carry their shoes until they got to the tabernacle so as to reduce wear and tear on precious shoe leather. They would stay for several nights, using the occasion to visit with relatives and acquaintances they saw so seldom except at these camp meetings.

I'm guessing the Des Arc tabernacle might have been built sometime in the 1920s or 1930s. When I was growing up in the 1950s the pavilion was still being used occasionally, although with automobiles everyone went home to their beds and daily chores. The tabernacle stood for many, many years after the last services were ever conducted there.

Mark and I sat in the car for a few minutes while I searched my mind's scrapbook for the few details I could recall about the tabernacle. Although I never participated in the "camp" part, I do remember listening to preaching at the tabernacle. Those were the days when hellfire and brimstone and the specter of an eternity of Hell were the main thrusts of every revival sermon.

When was the last time your preacher even mentioned sin?

A loving God is also a loving parent. And loving parents steer us through a maze of right and wrong. Sometimes a parent's "love" seems like just the opposite, doesn't it?

If you've ever needed divine guidance -- and you have, trust me, you would've benefited mightily from a week-long camp meeting. It has been way more than half a century since I sat on those hard benches at the camp meeting. So much has changed over those years -- but not, I contend, the core message of those fiery evangelists.

Brother Burnell, tell us another story.

Joe Sullivan is the retired editor of the Southeast Missourian.