Usually, but not always, during the hot summertime, congregations set aside a Sunday for homecoming at the church. This means that folk return to the churches where they spent their childhood and youthful years. At some point they went off to other places to seek their fortunes and rear their families. Still, they think of the churches of their family roots as their “home” churches.
In most cases they still have family members living in the community, regularly attending those churches. So, homecoming is in part a religious pilgrimage and in part a family homecoming. Folks travel great distances to mark these celebrations. As a young minister of a tiny congregation with only 18 resident members, I remember the excitement of welcoming more than 100 folk to church on homecoming Sunday each year. They were the extended family members of the faithful few who remained in the local community keeping the home fires burning.
One of the magnetic forces that keep the homecoming tradition going is the church cemetery. Through the years of my ministry I have preached at many, many homecomings. I have learned that it is very common to stroll quietly through the cemetery. They pensively meditate on the marble monuments, reading the names and inscriptions on the grave stones.
They are remembering their own relatives who are buried there, but also their friends and acquaintances. A meditation on the stones quickly reminds how families through the decades intermarried to create a network of kinfolk in which almost every person was blood-related to almost everyone else.
In many cemeteries, one can see the names of community pioneers, the powerful and the honored. In old, old church cemeteries, the stones are often not carved monuments but simple rocks marking graves of long forgotten names. Still, there is evidence of honor revealed in the careful landscaping around the stones.
In many Southern burial grounds, simple stones mark the final resting places of African slaves near the graves of those who for brief moments owned those slaves. Now in the wisdom and justice of God, death and eternity have finished their great leveling work.
Great, spirited singing is also always a feature of homecoming. And a sermon. A great homecoming sermon will call forth memories of those whose race has been run and who have moved from the Church Militant to enter the Church Triumphant. They are the “saints who from their labors rest.” It will also include a stirring call to renewed commitment to the spiritual values that made the church worth coming home to.
There are few symbols more powerful for one in my denominational tradition than the altar kneeling rail in the chancel of the sanctuary. That is the place where we were baptized as infants, confirmed in the faith as teens or adults, married, and finally where we will be memorialized. Always on homecoming Sunday, this Methodist preacher is finished only when my heart and emotions are left at that altar.
Then it’s time to eat! If some restaurant could capture the magic of the homecoming table, it would become the world’s most successful business. The Southern cooks — our grandmothers, mothers and wives — produce the dishes that make a church homecoming meal the quintessential soul food. A traditional description of homecoming is: “All day singing and dinner on the grounds.” I am sure that I am not the first to wish it could become known as: “All day eating and singing on the grounds!” Let the congregation say “Amen!”
Retired Methodist minister Harold Bales always loves a little food, folks and ecumenical fun. Contact him at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .
