Growing up at Royal Lane, I learned that being a Christian was about following the teachings and examples of Jesus more than anything else. I listened to sermons about hope, self-reflection, inspiration and forgiveness. But I also heard our ministers and teachers talk about doubt, confusion, and their own ongoing journeys of faith. Royal Lane gave me the freedom to question traditional teachings of the scripture and I was encouraged to ask questions, engage in spirited debates, and to think.

I realized at a young age that Royal Lane was different than other churches, and was certainly different than other Baptist churches. My friends seemed surprised by the messages of forgiveness, love, community, and openness I learned in my church. For many of my friends being Baptist meant being shamed, quieted, and hiding who they were. As a child watching women ordained into ministry, and serving as deacons, I learned that the opportunities to serve God were open to everyone. I was given the confidence to stand up for myself and for the teachings of Jesus.

Royal Lane feels like home. Brian and I love the traditional style of the worship services with the familiar hymns from our childhoods. But more importantly we appreciate that our church is filled with diverse and unique people who share a common desire to serve God through Jesus’ example and where all are welcome to do so. This is not a church filled with perfect people. This is a place for imperfect people to gather, care for one another, and to serve the community around us.

I believe Royal Lane is the best place for our children to learn and grow in their faith. Brian and I chose Royal Lane for our children. We want Grace, Emma, and Sadie to know that God’s love is available to all, and to have a place where they can truly learn to follow Jesus.

My family have been members of Royal Lane Baptist Church since November 2008.  My favorite parts of church are singing hymns, Sunday School, and special church events.  To me, church means learning about God in a way that renews me and comforts me, always knowing He’s there for me every day, watching me as life goes on.

No matter the distance, no matter the passing of time, God has kept us together, united in faith.

Your brother and sister in Christ,

Laurence and Janet

Mollie Cowden was the Sunday School teacher for a young women’s class. We never wanted to miss a single Sunday. Mollie was a profound scholar. When she talked about God in a personal way, I thought, “I want to know God like that!” In addition, people in the class really cared about each other, helping out in times of need. For a couple of years I worked full time and went to graduate school at night. The women in class would know all about each other and I wondered how. In 1972 I was able to start attending on Wednesday evenings and I thought, “This is how they know about each other.” This was also the year that our son, Jonathan, was born. We had a baby dedication service when he was 10 days old. He was scrawny and jaundiced. Don and Patsy Meier had their daughter, Lara, present. She was 2 months old, chubby and pink-cheeked. We laughed about the comparison for years.

Our adult Sunday School classes were thriving, but none of us wanted to sacrifice our class time to work in the children’s area. For a year or two Kathy Turner and I alternated Sundays, teaching in the 2nd grade class. It was really a disaster, certainly not fair to the children. I heard someone say that a really successful Sunday School class would have no members left. It got me to thinking and I committed to teach the 5th and 6th grade class. It became my calling. Theresa Helms taught the 3rd and 4th grade. One year we had an extra large class of 5th and 6th graders and they asked Theresa and I to teach together. We have been teaching together ever since, more than 30 years. We have a blast. Every year we adjust our activities to fit the gifts and interests of the children. We’re now in the 3rd and 4th grade, but we’ve never repeated a project. Our goal is to teach the children to love God, to enjoy each other, and to love to come to church.

In 1976 our daughter, Corrie, was born. In 1979 I was asked to serve as a deacon. I had worked for the same small company for 10 years. My world was complete. I was so content that I did not see Bill’s pain. I was devastated when he wanted a divorce. Royal Lane was supportive to both of us. We were one of the first couples, but certainly not the last, to both continue coming to Royal Lane after a divorce. Now, not then, I can see that God was at work. One thing that I’ve learned at Royal Lane is to ask for help, both from others and from God.

While married we had never really taken a family vacation. I wanted my children to have the experience of traveling across America. I would save money for two years and then we would take a trip, always including my mother, my aunt from Roswell, New Mexico, and a nephew. In 1987 instead of taking a vacation I went on my first mission trip to Del Rio, Texas. We only had four adults, Kyle Henderson, Van Temple, Paula Bright and myself. Paula had leukemia and this turned out to be the last year of her life. It was a tender experience for all of us. If you ever go on one of Royal Lane’s mission trips, you are committed for life. The only year that I have missed since then was in 2006 when I began the Alternative Certification teaching program with Dallas ISD. The missioners that year brought me back a hand-carved bench made in Kentucky. They all signed it and it is one of my true treasures. My sister, Kristene, reminded me that when we were children I was always organizing all of my siblings and neighbors into performing storybook plays, such as “Snow White and Rose Red.” We’d get the costumes, assign roles, and act out the story for whoever we could get to watch. My sister pointed out to me that that’s what I get to do on mission trips. I tell the stories of the Bible and get the children to act them out.

I also get to do the play acting with my grandchildren. Jonathan and his wife, Sofi, have nine children from age 3 to 15: Jon, Olivia, Cora, Hart, Bennett, Paul, Andrew, Sarah, and Y’shua. They live in Austin, but love to come to Bigmama’s house and to Royal Lane, especially for the donuts. Corrie and her partner, Kerry, have a 2-year old daughter, Hazel. They also live in Austin where Corrie is the Deputy City Auditor and Kerry is a counselor.

I’ve always lived life to the fullest, so my current treatment for breast cancer hasn’t changed that. However, Nancy Ferrell anticipated my needs long before I did. She organized a Cookie’s “Stress Reduction Plan”. I am thankful for all the people who came on Thursday nights to bring supper and to help grade Algebra II papers. God is trying to teach me patience. Royal Lane has taught me to value both personal and community relationships with God. I find the feminine characteristics of God to be a missing piece of the puzzle. One day Jo Ferguson and I were walking at Northpark near the F. A. O. Swartz Toy Store. The entrance included a portion of a huge green dinosaur leg with yellow toenails. Jo pointed to the smallest yellow nail and said, “This is how much we know about God.” She is SO right.

Author Sue Monk Kidd instantly drew me in to her book “The Dance of the Dissident Daughter” from the first paragraph of the introduction. She recalls a question she heard asked on National Public Radio: “Once you wake up, can you wake up any more?” She then goes on to describe a period of her life when she felt like she was waking up “some more.” As I think about my life, especially my spiritual life, I can definitely see patterns of waking up and waking up some more.

I cannot pinpoint when my initial “waking up” to the things of God began, because memories of hearing, thinking, and talking about God exist as far back as I can remember. Actually, I believe that we are born “awake,” with a strong sense of the Divine; something that is not taught to us, but is stamped upon our hearts as we come into being. I was extremely fortunate to have been born into a loving and caring family who not only taught me the basic principles of living as a Christian, but also put those teachings into action. My first step to become a follower of Jesus happened as a young child. Looking back, it was a simple understanding, but a real one nonetheless.

Throughout my childhood and teenage years, the basic foundation of what it meant to live as a follower of Christ was laid. I was, what Scott Jones has lovingly referred to as, a “church nerd.” I loved being involved in every possible activity our church offered. If the doors were open, we were there. I had great role models both at church and within my family.
I wouldn’t be completely honest, though, if I didn’t share that because of the type of church we attended, I was also picking up subtle (and not so subtle) fundamentalist ideas . . . ideas that would take many years to sort through and recover from. I remember the first time I heard a Royal Lane member admit to being a “recovering fundamentalist,” I thought, “What a wonderful way to describe me.” There are many messages I received from church that were not only unhealthy, but harmful to my soul. The one message that really stuck with me, and one that kept coming up again and again as I grew up, is ironically a principle that would never have allowed me to be standing here at this moment. This message was this: women are not to be in places of leadership whether at church or in a family. I have a vivid memory of myself as a young child, sitting in church on a Sunday night. Our pastor would close each Sunday evening service by asking a member of the congregation to pray. At some point I became panic stricken that perhaps he might call on me to pray. Being terrified at the thought of this, I began running through an escape route, something I could do to get out of the situation if, indeed, I was asked to pray. After rational thought returned, I felt a calm come over me as I had a revelation. It was absurd for me to think he would call on me to pray. Not because I was an 8 year old, but because I was a girl. In my 8 years of faithful attendance in church, I had never heard a woman pray or lead in any noticeable way during the service. Even then, a small fire burned in my soul that said, “No, this is not right.” Maybe these were the first stirrings of awakening.
My first big “waking up some more” period occurred in college. Joe and I, who had begun dating in high school, attended and were very involved in a conservative church in Lubbock. At some point during those years, we began to have lively and often emotional discussions with my family when we would come home for a weekend or for the holidays. My oldest brother was in the midst of his “crisis of faith” and this eventually led all of us to reexamine our most basic beliefs. During this period, the easy Sunday school answers and black and white view of the world became increasingly uncomfortable. I began allowing myself to contemplate the hard questions. For those of us coming from a fundamentalist perspective, even allowing yourself to consider these questions was considered a dangerous road . . . one that could lead to destruction (these were actual words of warning spoken to us by some good friends and mentors within the church as we began to vocalize our thoughts). This was a time when my personality of persistence and refusal to follow the crowd really paid off (my mom always told me it would). I was at the edge of the unknown. But surprisingly it was not scary. I felt the urge to dig deeper, to ask the questions, articulate the doubts, and begin the journey of truly living the life Christ called me to live. And at this point, there was no turning back.
We had been enduring the pain of forcing ourselves to sit through sermons and Sunday school classes at our church home in Lubbock. It was becoming increasingly difficult. During sermons, Joe and I would look at each other with that “Ooo, I can’t wait to get in the car and talk about this!” look. The final straw for me occurred when I went to speak with the associate pastor to ask a few questions about the direction in which he thought the church was moving. I specifically asked if he could foresee a time when women would be in leadership. His answer? Laughter. He actually laughed at me and said “No. If we have women deacons, who would be left to attend to our missions work?” Needless to say, Joe and I never attended that church again. And where to go from there? Well of course, the one church we had been warned by many people in Lubbock never to step foot in . . . Second Baptist. We were only at Second for a few months before we finished out our teaching careers and moved to Dallas. Then the journey of searching for a church began. That journey eventually led us to Royal Lane. We breathed a sigh of relief as we worshiped here for the first time 6 ½ years ago.
Based on what I know about myself and others who are embarking on their own journeys of faith, I know that we are never finished Waking Up. There is still much to learn. But for now, I am thankful. Thankful for the past that led me to where I am today, thankful for my wonderful, loving family, thankful for you, my community of faith, who encourages me and challenges me to continue on my journey. Thankful for this opportunity to be a servant leader. And thankful that, though my kids will likely have wounds of their own, they will never doubt that all of us are equally valued and everyone is welcome at God’s table.

We joined Royal Lane thirty years ago because friends who were members told us it was the kind of a church that we would appreciate. We found that so very true. Royal Lane members believe in the fundamentals of our faith: the Lordship of Christ, the son of God, born of a virgin, crucified but resurrected and our Savior from sin through our faith in Him. Royal Lane’s preaching has always been grounded in the Bible as the Word of God. Royal Lane’s inclusiveness sets her apart from so many churches, making her one out of many that demonstrates the inclusiveness of Christ, which, we believe, is grounded in a right interpretation of Scripture. Royal Lane’s members manifest their love for Christ and others in many outreach activities. And they show their love for their brothers and sisters in Christ constantly. We have dear friends through Royal Lane without whom our lives would be empty. At Royal Lane we can worship and find meaningful Christian fellowship. We believe that by contributing to Royal Lane, we are giving to God and God’s Kingdom, something that gives us joy and satisfaction. And may we preach just one sentence? We believe a tithe to fulfill a law is not sufficient; love needs to do more.

Somewhere up there…or out there… Sophie Rose Pines Nicolette and Charles S. Nicolette have got to be grinning. You see, this is the moment that they spent hundreds of hours grooming me for. Now, several decades later, after they have both gone home to be with their Creator, their only daughter Christine is for the first time in her life finally “giving her testimony.”

And it has to begin with them. You see, the past twenty-six years of my spiritual journey have probably not been too different from most of yours. However, 51 years ago, I was born into a family that was probably not that much like yours.

My spiritual journey indirectly began in 1938 when a man who said his name was Charlie Bernstein introduced himself to my mom on some tennis courts in Brooklyn, New York. Neither of their tennis partners had shown up, so they started to hit a few balls. Afterwards, he asked her out for some refreshment. Charlie Bernstein was actually Salvatore Joseph Nicoletti, but he didn’t tell my mom this because he suspected that she was Jewish and would not have anything to do with a Catholic Italian young man. And he was right. So the story goes that they dated and started to really like each other. And then my mom’s mother got very ill. One night when my mom was visiting her in the hospital, a young man from the American Seminary dropped by and gave her an Old Testament Prophesy Edition of the New Testament. That night she began to read it, and she couldn’t put it down. At 2 AM, she got down on her knees and asked Jesus to be her Messiah. A few months later, my dad converted from Catholicism to Protestantism, and he never looked back. Because of their unusual testimony, my parents were quickly on the testimony-giving circuit and spent more time in church then they spent anywhere else.

So I grew up in Long Island, NY, raised by two fundamental, zealous Christians who practically lived at church. If we weren’t there, we had a Bible study at our house. My parents expected me to be “saved” and baptized when I was a young child, and I was. Our only family vacations were traveling to Bible conferences on the East Coast. And then when I was five, my mother started to get sick.

I’ll spare you the many gruesome details and just tell you that from the time I was five until she passed away in 1996, my mother suffered from different stages of bi-polar disorder and neurosis. She spent more time in mental institutions during my childhood than she spent at our home, and I felt much safer and happier when she was gone. I have many childhood memories of kneeling down at the side of my bed with my wonderful daddy who was fifty years older than I next to me, and praying earnestly for her to get better. Year after year, my mother wasn’t there for me like other mothers were there for their children’s concerts, graduations, weddings, and the birth of their children.

Due to my mother’s illness, I left home at the young age of 14 and joined my brother in Wheaton, Illinois, which would become my spiritual home for the next eight years. It was at Wheaton where I met several surrogate family members who lived the Christ-walk that I knew I wanted to live when I grew up.

But after graduating from Wheaton College in 1979 and learning that there were no teaching jobs to be had in Wheaton, I crammed all my life possessions into my Ford Pinto and drove to the land of opportunity– Dallas, Texas. Now I was truly out in the world for the first time, teaching English at an inner-city high school. For the first time in my life I was surrounded by more non-Christians than Christians. And many of them seemed to be smarter than I was. So I began to question my faith. Why had prayer never made my mom better? Why did God allow so many innocent people in the world to suffer? Why were so many Christians that I knew so spiritually minded that they didn’t seem to be any earthly good? So one morning I decided to throw everything out and try to live my life without a belief in a God.

I lived exactly one day as an agnostic. And I have to say it probably was the saddest day of my life. By habit, I found myself starting to pray-and then sadly stopping myself. I felt empty-alone-and incomplete. And I knew so quickly that the Creator of the Universe was waiting for me to acknowledge Him once again. But things didn’t really make sense to me until God brought an intelligent, handsome young man named Scott Gonzalez into my life. And he was even one of the types of young men I hadn’t been meeting: a cool Christian! One of the first things we did together was to go to church, and it immediately felt so right to be back home in God’s house. We were married 13 months after we met-and there never has been any doubt that this was the helpmate that my parents had been praying for many years for God to bring into my life.

We’re getting ready to celebrate our 25^th anniversary in a few weeks, but it wasn’t until ten years ago that we found Royal Lane–a church that supported the flavor of faith that God had lead both of us to believe was the appropriate one for us. When our neighbor Jan Neece learned that we were looking for a church that would give our children a more solid foundation in biblical teachings, she told us about Royal Lane, a place that she had recently visited. We visited it the next Sunday. Our fourth grade daughter, Analise, was so happy to see woman deacons here; as she had told us we couldn’t join a church that treated girls as less important than boys. And David, our seventh grader, was quickly taken in by the many warm members of the youth group. And of course, Harry, Ray, and other church members made us quickly feel at home. The Sunday morning after we visited we were getting ready to visit one more church before we made a family decision on which church our family would join, when David asked me where we were going that Sunday. When I told him Walnut Hill United Methodist Church, he said, “Can you drop me off at Royal Lane?” God had spoken to us so clearly through our son…how could we be anywhere else?

So now, almost 10 years later, it is my turn to give back to this church that has given so much to our family. Whenever we have traveled from Dallas, we have quickly realized what an anomaly our Royal Lane experience has been, and how blessed we are to call it our church home. I didn’t think that it was possible to find such an open and affirming church in Dallas, Texas-a place that wasn’t judgmental, but rather one that sought to bring each person closer to God and let them serve, no matter what their gender, race, sexual orientation, or socio-economic level was.

A few months after we joined the church, I helped to start the Middle Place Sunday School class. This group of caring, spiritual women has become the group of close friends that I always dreamed was possible, but never had found anywhere else.

I want to thank you for giving me, a Christian woman, and the privilege of being ordained a Deacon. I’m praying that God will give me wisdom during these next three years so I will discern how I can use the gifts God has given me to give back to you-my church family that has blessed my life in innumerable ways.

My side of the story starts with the first time I met my wife to be, Terry Sturch. At the time, I was selling furniture at Haverty’s, and she was teaching music in Highland Park.  Fast forward to several months later and Terry is telling everyone inside RLBC “I Will!” to the question, “Will you take JJ Berrier to be your husband?”  That question really meant, “Will you be a mom to JJ’s three children?”  Well that was my first miracle at Royal Lane Baptist Church. That pretty much clinched RLBC as my church for life!

The year before we met, Terry moved to Dallas from Seminole.  She didn’t have to search for a church because her brother Tom was already a member of Royal Lane.  Tom is married to Marilyn Whatley’s daughter, Beverly, and they (along with our 2 nephews) have been living in Tampa, Florida.

Twenty five years plus have past and I can share that RLBC is a wonderful place to raise a small family, and to teach children about the life of Jesus. Terry, Sean, Donovan, Felicia and I have many terrific memories that were created with friends at RLBC.  From time to time, we enjoy bringing our six grandsons for “show and tell” to Royal Lane.  Terry and I both feel that our lives have been blessed immeasurably by our association with Royal Lane Baptist Church.  God is working through His people in this place.

Royal Lane is an extremely welcoming congregation whose strong foundation in Biblical principles encourages diversity and accepts everyone as a child of God.

As a freshman at Baylor, I joined 7th & James Baptist Church where our own David Matthews was the pastor. After graduating from Baylor, I moved to Dallas to begin my career and joined a sister church. Unfortunately I never felt connected there, so after not attending anywhere for a while, my friend Nancy Ellett invited me to visit RLBC, especially since she was on the staff! I quickly realized that Royal Lane would be my church home in Dallas. After joining and just casually mentioning to a couple of members that I enjoyed singing, I was recruited to sing in choir which I continue to enjoy thoroughly to this day. I can honestly say that many of my best worship experiences in church have been through music, either sitting in the congregation or in the choir loft.

I am blessed to have met many amazing people in the past 28 years at this church and hope that I have the opportunity to meet many more in the years to come. In my Care Group, I have developed some especially close relationships through our monthly dinners at members’ homes. I would encourage anyone looking for a church home and a place to belong to consider RLBC, or as many of us call it, the best kept secret in Dallas.