Quote:
Originally Posted by rayliotta
OBW, care to elaborate on this? I'm not sure if you're saying that perhaps there was something specific from these smaller Texas locales, that somehow propagated itself within the Recovery at large? Or am I misunderstanding?
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I couldn't say what might have been different in the ones in the various Texas cities in the earliest days relative to the others, such as in LA and elsewhere. But when I "came in" at the beginning of 1973, there was a lot of singing that included everything from small references to the church, to the songs that simply harp upon it constantly. (We're in the church, we're in the church, Oh Hallelujah in the church).
My first conference was in Philadelphia. John Ingalls and James Barber speaking about the good land. But even that was only appreciated by the church. We sang about "Laboring on Jesus, the good land . . . ." So many of the songs we used for our gospel meetings spoke a lot about Jesus up front, but then morphed into references about the church where it was supposedly so much better. These were all songs in the hymnal or in the common supplement issued by The Stream (predecessor to the LSM).
I made reference to the various original cities in the Texas area to note how far back it went, not to say anything special about them. They had consolidated a few years before to Houston, then a few moved to Dallas in 72 or something like that.