Worship
The interior of Bethlehem Baptist is striking, with high ceilings and impressive balconies. The bones of the sanctuary are relatively simple, but it is decorated seasonally and bestowed with bursts of color.
During the Easter season, for example, the church is adorned in explicit symbolism. On the stage, a rough wooden cross sits about 10 feet high, draped with a white cloth. Rocks are arranged in a clump at the foot of the cross, and the top of the cross is adorned with a crown of thorns. Behind the stage, perched on top of the wooden screen that separates the backstage preparation area from the sanctuary itself, are blue and purple flowers. On Mother’s Day, two stations of white roses and candles flank either side of the stage.
On a regular Sunday, though, the only color in the sanctuary (apart from the congregants) comes from a vase of roses on top of the piano on the stage. Each rose represents a new child born to members of Bethlehem Baptist Church, and at the beginning of the service, the Pastor reads out the names of the children born that week. Bethlehem Baptist is a large and wealthy church, so its relatively austere sanctuary makes a striking point in its own right.
Services
The sanctuary of Bethlehem Baptist is filled with congregants at 9 am and 11 am every Sunday. At these services, children ranging from ages two to five occasionally escape from their parents and run through the aisles toward the bathroom (conveniently located in the same direction as the post-service cookies). Other children are seen curled up on the grey padded cushions that stretch the length of the wooden pews, napping or watching their neighbors with unwavering stares.
Bethlehem worship services alternate between prayers and hymns and songs of praise. Clergy, or Bethlehem Elders, the governing body of the congregation, recite prayers. (All pastors and elders are men, though women serve as deacons at Bethlehem) Prayers range in content, sometimes offering praise and thanksgiving, drawing upon Biblical verses and/or making requests for strength and insight, as well as guidance in behavior or outlook. Two examples of the types of prayer offered in worship are as follows (the first prayer is a direct quote and the second is paraphrased):
“Father, we praise you that you are God merciful and gracious, you are slow to anger and you are abounding in steadfast love. We thank you Father that you won’t always chide; you won’t always keep your anger forever. We thank you Father that, as a father shows compassion to his children, so you show compassion to those who fear you. You remember our frame, you know that we are dust. God thank you that the highest heavens are above the earth so great is your steadfast love toward those who fear you.” May 13, 2012
Father, we thank you for your abounding love and ask you to help us learn how to love others. We ask you to help husbands to love their wives and, as the Bible says, help wives to submit to their husbands. April 15, 2012
On one 2012 visit to the 5 pm service (which is, as of 2024, no longer offered), the hymn "Come People of the Risen King" called the congregants to worship. During the first few stanzas of the hymn, parishioners—primarily white couples in their 20s and 30s in jeans and collared shirts or cardigans—meandered into the sanctuary, leaving behind tables covered with cookies, popcorn, and coffee in the vestibule. By the middle of the hymn, the cookies had been entirely abandoned and the male singer on stage called out, “Please stand and sing the next verse with us” before launching into a stanza that began with the following lines:
“Come young and old from every land/ Men and women of the faith/ Come those with full or empty hands/ Find the riches of His grace!”
The 5 pm Sunday service differed from the 9 am and 11 am Sunday services, in both its size and the age of the attendees. As of 2012, a typical service at the downtown campus filled around 90% of the 2-storied 1,200-seat sanctuary and drew a mixture of families and seniors. The 5:00 pm service was comprised overwhelmingly of college-age students and young men and women in their 20s and 30s and filled only part of the lower level of the sanctuary. As of 2024, this service is no longer offered.
Services continue with an offering. During a musical Offertory, ushers pass baskets down each pew to collect any offerings from the congregation. During the services observed between March and June of 2012, about one in three parishioner couples or families put money in the baskets (others perhaps make their offeringson a monthly or annual basis).
Others in the pews cradle worn, sometimes dog-eared, Bibles filled with underlined passages and margins crammed with notes, which appear to reference passages preached upon on previous Sundays.
The centerpiece of the service is the scripture reading and sermon, or proclamation of "the word." Congregation members read the scripture passages selected for the day, keyed to the sermon. Bethlehem parishioners typically bring their Bibles to church and follow along with the reading. The Bibles themselves are telling. Some congregants read electronic versions of the Bible on on their tablets or phones. Others in the pews cradle worn, sometimes dog-eared, Bibles filled with underlined passages and margins crammed with notes, which appear to reference passages preached upon on previous Sundays. The reader instructs those members of the congregation who are without Bibles to pull out the blue church-issued Bibles from the cubbyholes under the pews. The reader provides a page number, and the reader then begins to read verses from the New Testament and sometimes the Old Testament. Parishioners who do not use the blue Bibles seem to be able to navigate their Bibles by memory.
At this point in the service, one of the pastors, often the Pastor for Preaching and Vision, delivers the sermon. Topics vary widely, including subjects such as the corporate body of the church, doing the works of Jesus, and instructions for how one should and can “Always Pray & Not Give Up!”
The preachers heard at the time of this research craft their sermons as text-based, rather than topically driven. Pastors who preach wear suits and ties, as well as a headset microphone. When not giving a sermon, the pastors generally dress in slacks and a button-down shirt. The pastors at Bethlehem do not wear robes or collars that would dramatically distinguish them from lay people in the pews. One parishioner told me the purpose behind doing so was to show that “they look like us.”
The service continues with a song of praise in response to the sermon, followed by a Benediction, a closing prayer offered by a pastor.
