Holy Mayhem, Part II

The Second Coming of the Pentecostals in L.A. (2006)

This is the second part of a post about Pentecostalism in America and attending the Azusa Street Centennial conference in Los Angeles in 2006.

4.

I never met the Jewish Believer in person or interviewed her the way I’d wanted to. By the time I had an opportunity to approach her and pull out my digital recorder for a conversation, it was already too late. The Pentecostals would say it was God’s will that made me encounter her when I did, and there have been times, when thinking back on the role she played in my visit among the faithful, when I have almost been ready to consider it a sign. (Almost.)

I’d been waiting with the throngs outside the Convention Center for the charter bus that would take us to the West Angeles Cathedral, a monument to the new black empowerment in the Holy Spirit, to hear superstar evangelist T.D. Jakes deliver the sermon at the opening William Seymour Memorial Rally. There were competing events going on at different venues, though, and I filed my way onto an old school bus, painted white and stenciled with the words “The Dream Center,” which carried me to the Angelus Temple in Echo Park instead of the West Angeles Cathedral. The Angelus Temple had some high-power history of its own: it was the church built by early radio evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson in 1932. (This was before McPherson staged her own kidnapping to cover an affair and suffered a nervous breakdown. For a primer in the scandal, it’s worth watching The Disappearance of Aimee (1976), a made-for-TV movie, starring Faye Dunaway as McPherson, and none other than Bett Davis as McPherson’s scheming mother.)

While riding the bus to Echo Park and looking out the window, regretting my mistake, even if I knew this meant I would have a chance to see the televangelist and self-improvement guru Paula White from the Without Walls Church in Tampa (“The Perfect Church for People Who Aren’t!”), I overheard a woman a few seats behind me telling her story to the people she was sitting with. This was the Jewish Believer. It would have been hard to ignore her story no matter where on the bus I had been sitting: her voice was like a drill, and she was talking with an unnatural excitement, at least it sounded overenthusiastic to me, about having traveled all the way from Israel for the convention.

“I’m a Jewish Believer,” she kept on insisting, as if that fact, unexplained, were enough to justify her presence on the bus that night, and beyond that, in the universe.

“As Jewish believers in Christ,” she explained to her seat mates, “my husband and I still keep kosher. We follow traditional Jewish law, but we do it in the name of Yeshua HaMashiach …” Yeshua being the word in Hebrew for “salvation,” while HaMashiach translates to “the anointed one” or “messiah.” I heard a lot of Hebrew, or ‘stage Hebrew,’ anyway, from the conventioneers in Los Angeles. This goes back to seeking to know the ‘God of the Apostles,’ or the interventionist deity who spread the gospel at the founding of Christianity through signs, wonders, miracles, etc., in his “own language.” (Which most likely would have been Aramaic, but whatever …)

The story that emerged from the row of seats behind me was a simple and revealing one. She was an American Jew who had moved to Israel with her fiancé, also an American Jew, to rediscover their Jewish roots. But they had quickly grown disenchanted with life in Jerusalem, where they had settled—they had never felt at home with Israeli Jews. As she put it, “People made us feel like we weren’t Jewish enough.” After searching for a community in Israel to accept them, just as they are, they found a Christian church where their Jewish identity was valued instead of being tested, prodded, and shrouded in doubt.

With the help of a minister, she said, they began to learn the truths about Yeshua that had always been hidden from them by their Rabbis. Over time, and through prayer, they had both received “the Holy Spirit baptism,” and their lives had started over again.

The Jewish Believer had the zeal of a convert, pale skin with red acne spots, small round eyeglasses, and curly hair that she kept wrapped up in some kind of shawl arrangement. Her seatmates treated her like a foreign curiosity and peppered her with questions about Judaism all the way to Echo Park.

“If you want to learn more Hebrew,” she told them at one point, “there’s a great website called Hebrew 4 Christians. Like with the number 4 in it. The site is awesome.”

I am chastened to admit it now, given what the God of the Apostles had in store for her later in the convention, but I had harbored an intense dislike for the Jewish Believer almost from the time I took my seat over a wheel-well and settled in for a long, uncomfortable trip. No one likes an apostate, and I was—am—Jewish enough (or Jewish adjacent enough, anyway—my maternal grandfather was an Austrian Jew from Prague), to find much of what she revealed to her companions to be unnerving. I did turn and try and get her attention a few times as the bus sat in traffic—but she was unreachable in her monologue.

And this was the last I heard from the Jewish Believer until the bus ride home. We rolled up to the Angelus Temple, where the line to hear Paula White snaked around the block, and we were ushered off the bus and inside, flashing our conference badges, to take stake out our seats before the throngs rushed in. That night would be the first time I encountered fear and fury inside the temple, knew trembling amidst the mighty wail of tongues worship, and the instinct I felt kicking in every time the Jewish Believer opened her mouth was a precursor to the wrath I would soon be steeping in firsthand.

The service began that night with a procession of the flags (flags again) and opening remarks from Jane Hansen, the President of Aglow International, an interdenominational outreach ministry for women. (One of the three purposes listed on Aglow’s website is to “promote gender reconciliation with the Body of Christ, as God designed.”) Everything was staged for broadcast and lit by klieg lights while a soundtrack of piano music boomed over the P.A. system. A giant screen loomed to one side of the stage, showing live shots of the event while it was going on, and a crane kept swooping over the audience in its seats to wild and sustained applause.

It was a strange feeling, to be part of a church service and to watch it at the same time on a jumbo screen. And it was only later that I realized this sense of being in a meta-church and a mega-church would have seemed more natural to a believer than it did to me. Everything under God, after all, is for his eyes too. Whenever the camera panned over me, I became suddenly aware of a man sitting by himself in an emotive crowd made up almost entirely of women, writing furiously in a notebook while everyone else around him threw up their arms and swayed, concert style, to a ballad only God’s children could appreciate.

Terry MacAlmon is an unlikely prophet of hellfire and brimstone. His Christian pop songs are fueled by bathos, and his synthesizer, which he plays unaccompanied, has been programmed to emit only the sound of instruments from a cartoon symphony. But he knows his audience well, and they adore him. From the opening song of his performance, MacAlmon manipulated their heartstrings without shame and managed, in the space of twenty minutes, to work the Angelus Temple into a devotional frenzy that seemed both primal and utterly contemporary.

For you are great

You do miracles so great

There is no one else like you

There is no one else like you

I am still not exactly sure how MacAlmon made the jump from an over-produced, Disney-style adoration to a cacophony of raw emotive power that would make my hair stand on end. He would play a cheesy ballad, ask for prayer, play another song, lead another prayer, call out for the Spirit to descend, and then—bedlam.

As we glory in your embrace

As your presence fills this place

His performance had the rhythm of a sermon and the blood-curdling maw of primal scream therapy, all wrapped up in the inoffensive kitsch of his songwriting and his treacly instrument.

The gift of tongues, which Seymour plucked from the basement of the church and carried to his makeshift altar, comes in two forms: glossolalia, the utterance of sounds in no known language, and xenoglossia, the sudden ability to speak a foreign tongue. The annals of Pentecostalism are filled with missionaries who, convinced of their gift, found disappointment in the field when they tried to spread the Gospel without interpreters. In contemporary Pentecostal practice, however, glossolalia is the miracle of choice, and the Spirit that came down to the Angelus Temple when MacAlmon sent his request up made the women all around me still their bodies, close their eyes, and start to murmur softy to themselves. Taken together, it sounded like a whisper from the multitudes. He lifted his hands from the synth and started speaking in tongues himself (“Ummbadabada . . . Malayayada”), simple nonsense patter that gave the impression of a miracle that was only just warming up. The sounds around me grew in force, little by little, and among the odd and almost comic invitations to the divine I heard, so commonplace and yet instilled with aspirations for the supernatural, individual gasps, moans, and direct appeals stood out: “I need you, I want you, I love you … In your name! … Oh, Holy Spirit! Come, please come …”

MacAlmon would break out his trance every now and then, eyes still closed, arms held high with open palms, and spur the crowd on: “The earth belongs to God! Oh yes it does! We worship you, almighty God! There are no spectators allowed in this church! Worship is not a spectator sport! We worship you, almighty God!” The crowd responded by ratcheting up the volume, moaning louder, rocking in place and reaching higher, waving their open palms. “Father’s been waiting!” MacAlmon cried. “He’s been waiting for us!” Then he resumed the nonsensical flow of consonants and vowels in front of his keyboard, with the volume in the temple growing even higher, the voices I could make out from the general moan sounding more desperate, more beseeching, more animal. That’s it: the sound was more animal than human.

What, exactly, was I listening to that night? Was it a private collective truth or public performance? A miracle of tongues, as William Seymour contended, or a well-intentioned farce? It was the sound of 3,499 people calling out to God with their bodies and one man listening with an open notebook, already trying to find a common language to describe it. It was a yell, a groan, a shout, a gasp, a sob, a scream. It was heartfelt words for a lover. It was thunder, it was a traffic accident, it was the strange sound of a dial up modem looking for its transmission partner and the opposite of silence. It was human, and it was not, and as the frenzy in the temple reached another level, with people falling to their knees and one worshiper near me convulsing in the aisle, it was terrifying. REASON HAS NO CHANCE, I wrote in my notebook, and I still believe that.

I stood in the middle of this storm of Babel and felt afraid – for the words I knew, for the truths I cherished. Tongues worship, in a church that size, sounds like the answer to every question there ever was. It is the irrational sublime. It unlocks something inside the believer that is indifferent to the material world and immune to human knowledge—a voice behind language, full of instinct and desire, from deep in the inaccessible chambers of who we are and where we come from.

“Glorious!” MacAlmon called out over the din. “Glorious is our God!”

It may have sounded like glory in the ears of the believers, but to this visitor in the church that night, looking small and pale and frightened on the jumbo screen beside the stage, clutching a little black notebook and a pen, the effect was different: I felt like I had taken the wrong bus to a version of Hell that had been invented just for me.

5.

A reporter for the Los Angeles Times visited Seymour’s mission in the company of a Rabbi on Tuesday, April 17^th, 1906 and wrote in the next day’s paper of the “weird babel of tongues” he had witnessed and a follower who “prophesied awful destruction to this city unless its citizens are a brought to a belief in the tenets of the new faith.” When the Great Earthquake hit the city of San Francisco just as the paper was hitting newsstands, this warning became a fruit of the gift of prophecy—one of the “gifts of the spirit” (there are anywhere from nine to twenty-seven gifts in total, depending on the biblical interpreter). The gift of prophecy need not entail seeing into the future. It is more strictly an instance of receiving a message from God and sharing it with the faithful so that the Word can be better understood. Prophecy has been an accepted part of Pentecostal worship ever since the earliest days of Seymour’s revival on Azusa Street, so it was fitting that the service I attended at the Faith Dome—the 10,000 seat sanctuary at the Crenshaw Christian Center in South Los Angeles—began with some open-mike “prophesying,” with the Pastor Fred Price, Jr. acting as shepherd, tutor, and MC.

The Faith Dome rises from its flat, residential landscape like a space ship from the planet Jesus. It is the centerpiece of a campus that also includes a Christian school, tennis courts, a nursery, a cafeteria, a bookstore, a treatment center, and both indoor and outdoor parking facilities. Pastor and Founder Frederick Price, Sr.—a national leader in the Word of Faith movement—built it all, and he continues to preside over his flock with the air of a school principal who teaches one term of American History every year. His feet may still be in the classroom, but his mind has moved on to bigger things. Crenshaw’s members are predominantly black, and the atmosphere differed in ways both expected and not from the girdled hysteria—akin to dry-humping—that I’d suffered through at the Angelus Temple. The music was a lot better, featuring a gospel choir in royal blue robes, but the acoustics in the Dome muddied the rhythm section and dampened enthusiasm. A team of three cameras captured the service and projected it onto a pair of jumbo screens, and every so often a message would appear (“Paula Greene: please go the main foyer”), giving an intimate reminder that the many thousands gathered underneath the geodesic roof that night were, in fact, many thousands of individual people. The ushers wore an elegant uniform of ochre-colored jackets, white shirts, gold ties, and black slacks, while the regulars who filled the theater-style seating, rather than dressing for comfort, decked themselves out in their Sunday finest. (Is there any other place in American outside the Black church where women still wear hats with veils?) Pastor Price, Sr. and his wife Dr. Betty Price, also a minister at Crenshaw, shared a front-and-center row with Word of Faith colleagues Kenneth Copeland and his wife Gloria, in from the Texas bible-belt, and the night’s main attraction: Dr. Creflo A. Dollar, charismatic founder of World Changers Church outside of Atlanta, sitting his wife Taffi, CEO of their record company. Together these couples made the Faith Dome feel like one big exalted living room, which was no small feat.

The crowd had already been primed with a lesson and uplifted by the gospel choir when the prophesying got underway. Pastor Price, the younger, in a flawless pair of white spats, wielded the microphone with the facility of the charming truant he must have been, less Hip-Hop than R & B. “The Word and the Spirit agree,” he would say in approval, if he judged the prophecy to be right and true. Then he would thump his chest: “Unity.” A line formed in each of the aisles made up of people who believed they had been anointed with the gift of prophecy. Pastor Price wandered the blue carpeting around the altar, talk- show style, and signaled to the ushers, who kept order, when he and his microphone were ready for the next believer. The prophecies Price received were surprisingly uniform and dogmatic. Many spoke, trembling from nerves, about a Second Coming of the Spirit over Los Angeles even more powerful than the first; some proclaimed that God was gathering them like an army to spread His Word among the heathen; and one African believer, with a voice that demanded a pulpit of its own, did much the same with his prophecy before he launched into a long and vitriolic attack against homosexuality. This sparked the crowd to life for a moment, bringing ripples of applause and a low murmur, and Pastor Price followed-up with a reminder, briskly delivered, about “hating the sin but loving the sinner.”

My interest in the gift of prophecy had flagged before the outburst, though. From what I could gather from my seat in the dome’s outer reaches, sharing a microphone with a prophesying audience was just like sharing a microphone with any other audience, with a little added drama and more King James English. I was far more interested in the alerts that kept on flashing across the screen (“Star Baskerville: please go to the nursery”), and in watching the prophets, shrunk back to their normal size again, heading up the aisles to retake their seats. Then I heard a voice, like St. Augustine, only this one was harsher and came, undeniably, through the P.A. system:

“I am calling the church to intimacy with me,” the voice cried. “I am calling the church to intimacy with me …”

I looked out at the jumbo screen and saw the Jewish Believer. Hair still wrapped in rags, T-shirt long and baggy, eyeglasses greasy. She had come to the Faith Dome that night, anointed by the Holy Spirit, and she had carried her gift to the microphone and wanted to share her prophecy from God with her brothers and sisters. She was sweating, her voice trembled and she spoke, and she had shut her eyes tight against the world, as if to better see her visions and dream her dreams. Pastor Price held the microphone with a new distaste and eyed her with skeptical concern.

“There are those among you who would divide the Body of Christ … There are those who would divide the church and despoil the body of my son …”

Pastor Price pulled the microphone away from the Jewish Believer before she had the chance to finish and turned his back while one of the ushers ferried her away. He was agitated by her prophecy, visibly, and struggled, for a moment, to figure out a response to such a plaintive imitation of God (“I am calling the church to intimacy with me . . .”). As he paced on-camera, shaking his head, Pastor Price finally explained: “That was all about emotionalism, not the word of God. Don’t be angry at me. If I’m wrong, God will work it out. But that was coming out of emotion. I don’t believe she had the gift of prophecy.”

BOBBIE JOHNSON, a message flashed, PLEASE GO TO THE MAIN FOYER.

I struggled to see where the Jewish Believer had gone when the usher directed her back down the aisle to her seat, but the Faith Dome was just too big and there were still a herd of prophets waiting for the chance to share their gifts.

As disturbing as I had found this episode, and as vexed as I was by the questions it raised about the community of believers I thought I had discerned, Creflo Dollar made my misgivings disappear. He is a truly talented preacher of the Gospel of Prosperity—a message that he seems to justify with every gesture, smile, nod, snort, and sly joke at the expense of his followers.

“My lesson tonight,” Dollar announced, stalking the carpeted aisle in a gray suit with a 4-pointed pocket square, which would grow crooked over the course of his nearly two-hour sermon, “is called ‘Unfolding the Mysteries of God.” He started by having all of us turn to our neighbors and say out loud: “I’ll never be broke again.”

I did as he asked with the three people sitting closest to me, and it was more fun that I had expected; but there was also something cathartic about sharing this sentiment with a total stranger. It was a novel way of using language to build trust in the sanctuary and reveal a shared aspiration.

With this simple introduction out of the way, the Rev. Dollar opened up his bible and launched into the clearest and most compelling endorsement of tongues worship I had heard to date. He took his time, beginning with a verse from Deuteronomy about “the secret things of God” and “those things which are revealed,” jumping to Isaiah next and identifying a passage that proved, he said, waving his bible in the air, that “we must travel through the Word to get to the Spirit.” Every time he urged us forward to another passage of the scripture, the sound of turning pages filled the hall with echoed crinkling. From Isaiah he turned to the Book of James, and from James he turned to 1 Corinthians chapter 2, and from 1 Corinthians 2 he turned to back to Deuteronomy again, revisiting the phrase “the secret things of God.” The worshippers listened attentively while Rev. Dollar performed his exegesis, nodding his head when they agreed and employing pink and yellow highlighters. His lesson boiled down to this: the language of tongues comes from God himself and is filled with secret truths and hidden things. It is divine wisdom in its untranslated state, and it is given to us by God, as a gift of the Spirit, to lift us into the Glory of his Presence. It is the power of God come down to earth, and therefore it is a mystery to the wisdom of men. But not to those who practice it. For the believer it is a secret weapon against debt, illness, marital trouble, drugs, stress, nightmares: everything.

I wondered, watching to the Rev. Dollar deliver his sermon in his impeccable suit with his hair shining underneath the klieg lights, what William J. Seymour, the penniless and half-blind father of the Pentecostals, so scarred by smallpox that he was described as “an old colored exhorter” at the age of thirty-six, would have thought of the production at the Faith Dome that night. If his goal had been to create a “living, practical Christianity” and restore the signs and wonders from the time of the Apostles to the everyday believer, then the Pentecostal movement has succeeded beyond anything he could have dreamed. I didn’t see him in the plenty of the offering buckets, which had already carried off a three-day total of $215,862.07, we were later told, from the worshippers at Crenshaw in small white envelopes, and I didn’t see him the cold expanses of the sanctuary, fading into black, which felt like the universe itself. I didn’t hear him in the Rev. Dollar’s snicker when he made a joke about the hair extensions in the audience and a naked horse wandering the streets somewhere in Los Angeles, or in his lesson when he reverted to the Word of Faith theology he has used to build an empire (“The Word of God,” he promised, falling still to emphasize his point, “is the gateway to the world of wealth!”). But Seymour was there—he was a presence. I saw him in the people sitting near me in the dome, bibles open in their laps, pens in hand, earnestly contending, as the line from Jude exhorted, for a faith which was once delivered unto the saints. And I heard him at last, when the Rev. Dollar’s sermon reached its climax and he worked the crowd into a frenzy, stomping down the aisle, shaking his fists against the Evil One and crying: “Satan has no defense against a Holy Ghost filled, fire-baptized, tongue-talking Christian! Satan has no defense against a Holy Ghost filled, fire-baptized, tongue-talking Christian!” The crowd was already on their feet and they let out a mighty roar that was loud enough, and strange enough, to shake the foundations of the Christian church.

At the end of Creflo Dollar’s sermon, when the time came for a final reckoning, they were lining up in the aisles of the Faith Dome from both near and far, five and ten and twenty deep, with more arriving all the time, to accept Christ as their savior and to receive the blessings of the Holy Spirit, just as Seymour had foreseen.

A publicity shot of Creflo Dollar

6.

Outside the buses were idling with their cabin lights on and the parking lots were already beginning to empty of the faithful. It had been a bountiful harvest. The newest members of the Pentecostal army emerged from the exits in single file and were ushered along a covered passageway by volunteers in matching T-shirts to a Prayer Room on the second floor of an outbuilding. There were children as young as five or six, teenagers in baseball hats and braces, young couples holding hands, mothers holding infants, fathers carrying empty car seats, single women in business suits and raincoats, men who looked as if their hearts weren’t in it, the elderly in every possible condition. I haunted the area by the buses for a few minutes, looking for the Jewish Believer. Her appeal to God had been so raw and the rebuke had been so public and definitive that I wanted to try and be there for her, to say something, maybe even put my arms around her—just like so many had done for me that week. But I never saw her in the windows of any of the buses, and the night was filling up with headlights. It was time to leave the Pentecostals to their harvest and go home. Before I left the Faith Dome and crossed the parking lot to find my rental car, I took another minute to stand by the exits and watch the saved filing out to meet the Holy Spirit—they were still coming. It comforted me to imagine that the Jewish Believer had joined them and was already inside among her chosen people. They would hold her and they would pray for her. They would forgive her all her flaws and her false prophecy. And when the Holy Spirit fell on her again, moving her lips with its own mysterious message, she would have nothing to fear, nothing to regret, nothing else to aspire to. A salvation without known words, in any earthly language, would set her free for all eternity.