Editor’s note: This piece is funny but in a way that might be offensive to some readers. Proceed with caution if you don’t care for the humor of fifth-grade boys.
At a Friday lunch of Baptist college professors, a religion professor who eventually retired as pastor of a large Baptist church told the group, “Every male is just one word from the fifth grade. I’ll prove it.” Then he said, “Boogers!” Every male at the table started laughing. The one female shook her head.
Any committee charged with naming something needs a male with an adolescent mind and street smarts to warn the rest of the committee to avoid landmines. For instance, I once served on a planning committee at the above-mentioned Baptist college. The college was coming up on its 150th anniversary, and this coincided with a substantial gift of adjacent land that was going to be turned into a park.
Brad Bull
A young female on the committee said, “Let’s call it Sesquicentennial Park.” The room exploded with affirmation, except for one young man shaking his I-once-lived-in-a-men’s-dorm head.
I said … I mean, that member of the committee said: “No way, y’all. Less that 15 minutes after we announce that name, the students will be calling it Sexuicentennial Park.”
With dejected resignation, the woman who had made the reasonable suggestion seemed to nod in agreement as if saying: “Ugh. You’re right. Why did God create men?”
The park now goes by the very youthful name “Centennial Park.” It lost 50 years but, since a member of the committee was able to channel fifth-grade humor, it avoided being besmirched forever.
In the early 1990s, as a seminarian working as a reporter for the state Baptist newspaper of Kentucky, I realized some churches could have benefitted from such a “juv-e-male” mind before hanging their signs. I encountered many church names because one of my jobs was doing a denominational newspaper’s equivalent of obituaries. Any time a minister left one church to go to another, I had to report the name of the church being departed as well as the new church. I also had to list the city and the regional association of which each church was a member.
This required me to thumb through a massive dot-matrix printout of all 3,544 Southern Baptist churches in the state in 1991. And keep in mind that many of Kentucky’s churches were founded a long time ago when words perhaps meant something different.
One day I was looking up …
“I reflexively giggled, thinking this apparently repressed congregation had suffered a previous tragic loss.”
Well, before I tell you this, I want to point out that the words “testament” and “testimony” come from the same root as the word “testicle.” That’s because of the ancient tradition described in the book of Genesis of making an oath by placing one’s hand on the inside of the thigh of the man receiving the pledge. I’m dead serious. These images are in the Bible and our holiest language, so let’s not be too squeamish here.
Anyway. One day I was looking up the association corresponding to something like Blue Mountain Baptist Church. Now, I’m gonna need you to brace yourself. I swear on the loins of Abraham, as I scanned down that alphabetized list, 25-year-old me spied that there was a congregation named Blue Ball Baptist Church.
I reflexively giggled, thinking this apparently repressed congregation had suffered a previous tragic loss. Before I could recover from the discovery of that ribald image, I saw that the next name on the list. So help me it was Blue Lick Baptist Church.
I’ll let you imagine what happens when interns in their 20s gather around such a list. It was a moment of bawdy mirth until, Mark my words (yes, he was there), we needed to wing our way back to the field of work before our supervisor discovered us without our noses to the grindstone.
Just when I thought it couldn’t get worse, I went to pick up some photos in an unfamiliar part of Louisville. Back at the paper, the secretaries explained that the section of Louisville I’d passed through was pronounced pen-EE-ull — even if it was spelled P-e-n-i-l-e.
“I nearly wrecked my car when I saw Penile Baptist Church.”
I nearly wrecked my car when I saw Penile Baptist Church. (According to Wikipedia, “the origin of the neighborhood’s name is believed to be attributed to the biblical place name of Penuel.” You can’t make this stuff up. It’s an example of the quotation — wrongly attributed to Mark Twain — “Truth is stranger than fiction, because fiction has to make sense.”
When I was a minister in Knoxville, Tenn., one of my congregants, Howard Cockrum, was the owner of a paving company and was the last layperson to serve as chair of the Southern Baptist North American Mission Board, based in Atlanta. Howard told me he had ordered a plaque to honor the bivocational pastor of the year — who served a congregation in the Tennessee Valley. The plaque came back misspelled as French Road Baptist Church. Howard checked the invoice and saw he had spelled the order correctly. He called the engraver in Atlanta — who wasn’t aware that the topography of Tennessee includes a wide river whose Cherokee name was translated “Broad River” and, upon the advent of European colonizers, the named had evolved to “French Broad River.” The engraver said, “I changed the spelling to French Road Baptist Church, because I didn’t believe there would be a Baptist church named after a French broad.”
Obviously, all these churches were named after their geographic location. But one wonders why, with so many viable options for a church’s name — Immanuel with an I, Emanuel with an E, Grace, Trinity — why not go with something other than the geographic name? That’s especially true if you live somewhere like Morehead, Ky. or Cherry Bottom, Tenn.
Hey, I warned you. Don’t shoot the messenger, Rifle Range Baptist Church.
Brad Bull graduated from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., in 1992. While a student, he occasionally performed standup comedy on open mic night at the Funny Farm. He can be reached at DrBradBull.com.