My parents went to churches where sermons lasted 1½ hours, but when I grew up they had been shortened to appr. 45 minutes. Sometimes men would suddenly stand up in the middle of a sermon. They began to feel sleepy, and this was the way to stay awake. Other men would enter the church with a cigar still between their lips, as they sat down, they held the cigar in their hand for a while until the fire was dead and then put it on the ledge beside Bible and psalm book. You couldn’t just sit anywhere in church. Family pews where distributed once a year on a first-come-first-served basis. Five minutes before the service a red light above the pulpit would go on, and then all left-over seats were free. Sometimes large numbers of people would wait by the door for the light to go on, and then quickly run to an empty seat. Later this practice was abandoned … it wasn’t particularly conducive to evangelism efforts.

Vennekerk Today

Vennekerk Then

There were no ushers or greeters. Little effort was made to make church attractive for younger people. On the gallery older boys would play cards and often make a lot of noise, until the consistory decided that elders should take turns to stand at the back of the gallery and oversee the youngsters. Sometimes these elders just dragged a noisy fellow out of church. I was never allowed to sit there. The more decent young men would occupy one or two pews at the side of the church, but even there it grew noisier, so that, when the elders came in with the minister before each service, one elder would walk over to those pews and plant himself right in the middle of a perceived trouble area. As you can see, even the most orthodox, most God-glorifying congregation (we beheld ourselves to be the only true church in the Netherlands, although even that climate of surety was already changing at that time) wasn’t exactly without problems.