I was at a medium sized H congregation and they announced that they would like the congregation to consider the cancellation of adult verses. Afterwards one person suggested that it could be due to the expelled people who come to church and continue to stand and say verses instead of graciously declining. It was suggested that because the staff can't tell the expelled not to say verses, they would simply cancel adult verses. Anybody ever hear of this before?

Sorry for my ignorance, but what are 'adult verses'? (I'm assuming we're not talking about the steamier sections of the Song of Solomon and other parts of the OT)...

It's just a thing where the congregation takes turns saying a verse prior to service starting. (adults one week, youth the next, the different grades the next). The adults would no longer be a part of this rotation.

I wonder what the difference would be between singing Hymns and reciting Bible verses. Are they also going to eliminate congregational singing?

Strange bunch, those Holdemans.

YoYo, thats interesting. Must be a regional, or congregation thing. I've never heard of it.

YoYo, I have never heard of this before. Of all the H churches I have attended I have never seen anyone stand up and recite verses. I wonder what is wrong with the expelled saying Bible verses?

I wonder what is wrong with the expelled saying Bible verses?


GM, quoting scripture is why they were expelled in the first place! Holdeman religion hates bible quoting without the conference idol there to interpret

We never had adult verses in the local cong here. but for yrs every sun after SS, one child from each class would recite the memory verse. This was a part of the program for yrs. until about 10-15 yrs ago there was some children that declared they were just simply too embarassed to do it and their parents put up a todo about it and it was all canceled. I guess I always thought that scripture memorization was something that we should do and that there were other ways to handle things than just quitting like that. There also used to be liberty given after almost every sermon for someone to give testimony and there was also a time after SS that they used to continue the discussion with the whole cong. All those have given way to controlled form. Another thing that was done here was they used to only have church on the 2nd, 4th, and 5 the sun eve of the month and one yr they decided to split the cong into 3 groups and one sun eve a month, one group would be the host and 2 families from the other groups would be the guests. It was to get them visiting around more and make for closer communications. It was a lot of fun and worked real well. they stopped that when they exed me cause they made a decision to not allow households that had X spouses to be hosts and that made 3 families that could not be hosts and we were just supposed to go visit wherever we wanted and We had personally been told not to come to some homes on those nites as they did not have room for us, as there were 9 of us at the time.

About the saying "there is liberty". It must be an H saying totally. We had to laugh when we had a visiting minister a couple months ago for a seminar and he told about going to visit an H cong in Oregon and it musta been for a singing nite. He said they kept saying, "There is liberty." He finally decided that it meant, you are free to talk if you feel to, so he used that in his talks when he was giving people opportunity to ask questions. He would say "There is Liberty"