Remembering a Little Church in Atlanta, Kansas 
~ By James Banzer

Maybe you have heard it said that civilization is held together by a tiny and fragile thread. The thought goes that it would not take much for that thread to snap, resulting in the disintegration of society.
   There is surely some truth to this. The thread seems to be getting more worn and frazzled by the day, and one must wonder how much longer it will continue to hold us together as an alternative to savagery.
   You have to wonder just how much more evil this world is going to become before everything totally falls apart. The cohesiveness of civilization sometimes
seems to be disintegrating before our very eyes, while many people fail to take any real soul-searching notice of the little signs of this. It's been creeping up on us for a long time.
   You may think of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks as being an indicator of the coming fall of civilization as we have known it. Really though, 9/11 wasn't where it started. Disintegration of society had been in progress for years before that.
   By way of illustration in the most simplistic of terms, I have some vivid memories of my dad, who had been a full-time preacher before I was born, and
then reverted to being a part-time minister. When dad was a young man, he had ministered in a couple of small town Kansas Methodist churches. That was back in the 1930s.
   One of those towns was Atlanta, Kansas, a town which has stood still in time and today has a population of 255 people. No doubt, it was not far from that size back then.
   After Atlanta, and before getting out of the full-time ministry, he preached in Bazine, Kansas, which was - and is - another of those blips on the map.  Bazine's population today is 311.
   They weren't your bustling metropolises. They were simply simply places where a farm boy from Denison, Texas chose to go to save souls.
   Years after ceasing to call the preaching profession his primary career, my father one day packed mom and us two boys in the car. We took a
trip to tiny Atlanta. Even in the 1950's he was impressed to find the church door unlocked. This wasn't commonplace in Wichita at the time.
   The contrast between small town America and the larger cities remained something that he talked about frequently during and after that trip. He discussed
how it was a fact of life that anywhere else, even in the '50s, people had to be on their guard against intruders.
   Maybe there are still little Atlanta's that remain that way, but surely they are a lot harder to find today. The world is much more cruel. The times when neighbor helped neighbor - and neighbor trusted neighbor - are vanishing. Those days are not totally gone, but the clock seems to be ticking toward the midnight hour.
   Fires are reported in about one out of every 150 churches in the United States every year. The majority of these blazes are caused by arsonists. The hate which is directed toward religion is rampant in this society. Church or synagogue vandalism is not uncommon at the hands of professed satanists or other ungodly creatures of today's society. Respect for humanity is lost on these sad individuals.
   Here in Louisville, Kentucky area where I now reside, there are four nearby churches where ropes or gates keep one from getting up to the front door on any day but Sunday. Whenever I pass by one of these churches, my thoughts go back to that little open door Methodist church in Atlanta, Kansas. My memories go back to dad telling us kids to get out of the car and come up to the church to see what was inside because the door was unlocked.
   My thoughts revolve around why we can't return to those times. It's probably not going to happen. Society has become accustomed to expecting the worst
from its fellow man. The age of terrorism has escalated this attitude, but certainly is not the beginning of it.
   One thing helps though. It's a little four-letter word called hope. As long as there are still people who are determined to try to overturn the badness, replacing it with with goodness while spreading positive influences, hope can remain alive. Who knows?
   Maybe things can turn around one day. It doesn't hurt to hope. A little bit of prayer doesn't hurt either, even if you can't find a church with an open door in
which to do it.

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