Following on from the “husbands in cars” memory: Rachel made a good point that our services were very demanding. If the “unsaved” husband actually went inside the building he could very easily have been targeted by the preacher. Maybe even named and called out. (It happened many times.) Ours was also a very emotional religion: men of that generation were commonly uncomfortable with such outward emotion, even if they inwardly believed.

We had a point midway in the service (I don’t know how commonly this was done in other churches) where the pastor, or someone called up by the pastor, would open the floor for prayer requests. They could be spoken out by anyone in the congregation and then we would kneel (by which I mean knees on the floor, elbows on the pews—not any of those fancy kneelers the “formal” churches had) and pray for a few minutes. Many of those women would—every service, and for years on end—request prayer for their “lost husbands” or, even more commonly, “lost children.”