Our planned evangelistic services were imminent; a preacher and a men’s quartet would be arriving on Sunday. Our pastor didn’t want the disaster cleanup to distract from that effort, so he let people know that no more volunteers were needed.

He thought flowers for the church would be a nice touch so he sent one of the ladies to order flowers. All the flower shops in Moose Jaw were owned by one extended family. The basements of two family hames had flooded and volunteers had cleaned them. The pastor told the lady that if she casually mentioned that the flowers were for the church that had done the cleanup they might just offer to give the flowers at no charge. The strategy worked.

Really, all the members of the church had day jobs and all the work had been done by volunteers from out of town, but the news media gave all the credit to the church. The first night of the meetings, the mayor of Moose Jaw came to thank the church on behalf of the people of Moose Jaw.

I found all this a little disconcerting, but it would get worse. The men from Linden had left a bunch of tracts with us and we read most of them. Chris read one that taught about how a Christian woman should cover her head when praying. At a Bible study shortly after the evangelistic meetings, Chris innocently asked if that was still a requirement for Christian women. The unanimous answer was no. Many remembered that their mothers or grandmothers had worn head coverings, but didn’t know why and were happy the practice had stopped. One lady said “The Bible also says that a woman shouldn’t wear men’s clothing. As long as I wear pants I’m not going to worry about a head covering.”

I was working evenings at the Post Office and didn’t get in on that discussion. But I was in church to witness the aftermath the following Sunday. The pastor began his message by saying “The question has been raised about whether women should wear hats to church.” He went on from there to ridicule the idea of women wearing big flowery hats to church that would look ridiculous and hinder the view of people behind them in the pews. That wasn’t at all the question that Chris had raised and he never did address the teaching of the apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians chapter 11.

When we got home, I told Chris “You hit a nerve.” The pastor’s desperate attempt to stifle any discussion of this topic would have been humorous if it hadn’t been so sad. Perhaps it did work for those who were already of that mind, but for us in our search it seemed like there might be a truth here that he was afraid to even look at.

Then we got a phone call from one of the men from Linden who had been to Moose Jaw. He told us that there were tent meetings being held at Osler, north of Saskatoon. That was almost a three-hour drive, but we decided to go Sunday evening when I didn’t have to work. The tent was set up on a vacant lot just off the highway. We had no trouble finding it and soon we were attending our first service of the Church of God in Christ Mennonite. We enjoyed the singing, the preaching was more straightforward than we had heard before, no beating around the bush.

There were a couple of travel trailers parked behind the tent and we stayed until 1:00 a.m. visiting with the ministers and got home at 4:00. That was fine, since my work shift didn’t start until 3:00 the next afternoon.

We went back to the Moose Jaw church the next Sunday and they were markedly uninterested in our trip to the tent meeting. Finally we decided that we were travelling a different path than the rest of the church and stopped going.

We made a trip to Linden on a long weekend that summer and thoroughly enjoyed it. There were two tiny congregations of that church in Saskatchewan, one at Hague and one at Bredenbury. Each one was a three-hour drive, but we visited each several times.

There was a stumbling block, though, that prevented us considering membership in this church. They believed that their church was the one that Jesus was building and that all others were man-made churches.

That fall the Sutera twins came to Moose Jaw to hold revival meetings, sponsored by all the evangelical churches in the city. We attended as many as we could, they went on for several weeks; the attendance outgrew the church where the meetings began and the meetings moved to a larger one.

The meetings were aimed at born-again Christian people and the messages all came down to the point that if you had sin in your life and were not willing to repent and forsake it, God could not bless or use you. The messages were good as far as they went.

We were well enough acquainted to know what was going on in most of the evangelical churches and knew there was some level of strife and dissension in each of them. That was never addressed, but I wondered if the theme of Ralph and Lou Sutera didn’t especially apply to churches. How could God bless or use a church that knew there was sin in its midst and saw no way to do anything about it?