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Moms’ Malaise

Books Reviewed:

Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety. By Judith Warner. Riverhead, 304 pp.

The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined All Women. By Susan J. Douglas and Meredith W. Michaels. Free Press, 400 pp.

The Myth of the Perfect Mother: Rethinking the Spirituality of Women. By Carla Barnhill Baker, 190 pp.

 

My friends and I pride ourselves on not being status-conscious suburban moms. We don’t try to replicate Martha Stewart’s cupcake icings, we don’t throw themed birthday parties with paid entertainers, and we don’t worry about whether our three-year-olds’ preschools are sufficiently rigorous to prepare them for Yale. In other words, we’re not the perfection-obsessed control freaks that Judith Warner portrays in Perfect Madness.

We do, of course, have our own obsessions. We feel guilty when our kids watch TV and we worry over how to get them through Valentine’s Day red-dye free. We feel just as righteous when we live up to our own maternal standards of perfection, just as guilt-ridden when we don’t.

Anxiety, fear, exhaustion, guilt, self-doubt, anger -- these are the hallmarks of modern motherhood in America, according to Warner and other recent authors. It’s been called the mommy mystique, the new momism, intensive mothering, total-reality

motherhood or simply, as Warner puts it, ‘the Mess." Whatever it is, Warner and her colleagues claim that this obsession with perfection is sapping women of energy and resources that could be channeled into activism for family issues like health-care benefits, maternity leaves and child care.

The real story of contemporary American motherhood isn’t the media-hyped catfight between stay-at-home moms and working mothers that, as Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels write in The Mommy Myth, allows "the politicians who’ve failed to give us decent day care or maternity leave" to "go off and sip their sherry while mothers point fingers at each other." The mommy wars are mostly a fiction. Women move back and forth between employment and home, and women who consider themselves stay-at-home mothers may work the same number of part-time hours as women who identify themselves as working moms. No, the real story is that motherhood has become a stress-laden and guilt-ridden project due to the societal veneration of stay-at-home moms, the workplace requirement that women be overachievers just to stay even with their male colleagues, economic anxiety about class standing and, above all, government and corporate refusal to devise family-friendly policies.

At least this is the story in the United States. Warner sets up her first chapter as a comparison between mothering in the United States and mothering in France, where she lived for several years. There she found high-quality, affordable preschools, complete with government subsidies and sliding-scale fees. There she encountered mothers with four months of paid maternity leave, the right to cease employment for up to three years and have their jobs held for them, and cash grants from the government during the time they stayed at home. There she found a culture in which "the needs of the mother were considered every bit as central to family happiness as the needs of the child."

What she found in the United States was much bleaker. Here she met women obsessed with trivialities, driven by perfectionism and guilt and, most of all, filled with a diffuse dissatisfaction. Unable to find adequate and affordable child care for her own daughter, Warner sensed that her dream of maintaining a professional life while having time for her family was crumbling, and she soon found herself developing the same "quiet panic" as the mothers she was meeting at the playground.

Douglas and Michaels paint their own picture of a mother’s utopia, set not in France but in an earlier era of U.S. history. They tell us that during World War II, when 6 million U.S. women entered the workforce, government-supported child-care centers offered on-site immunizations, care for kids whose parents worked the late shift and even take-home dinners. Then the war ended, and so did the political will to fund day care. Too communist, said some. Too expensive, said others (an argument that politicians still use, apparently forgetting that we’ve managed to scrape together at least $150 billion to invade and occupy (Iraq). So here we are in 2006, with parents piecing together a patchwork of arrangements to care for the kids while they’re at work, and with only the richest having access to high-quality child care.

You can argue about these authors’ definitions of utopia. What is less debatable is the way economic class defines women’s experience of motherhood in the United States. Beyond the diapers and tantrums that unite mothers across class lines are the real markers of class: Can you choose to stay home with your kids? Do you have access to affordable and high-quality child care? Do you have the security of a flexible schedule and an employer who won’t fire you for taking a day off to care for your sick child?

Douglas and Michaels choose to foreground class in their analysis, devoting their strongest chapter to an examination of the media’s construction of the "welfare mother," especially during the 1990s. Depictions of women on welfare only fueled the new momism, they claim, by creating "delinquents who dramatized what happened to those who failed to comply, delinquents other mothers could feel comfortable about putting in detention." Welfare mothers occupied one side of "the maternal media diptych, opposite the celebrity mom" so celebrated in women’s magazines and TV features. It was fine, even a tad chic, to stop working when you had kids and even to have multiple fathers for your children -- as long as you were rich, white and famous.

Carla Barnhill makes a similar point in The Myth of the Perfect Mother: "I’ve never been able to figure out why there are those who insist that mothers stay home with their children unless they are poor, in which case they better go out and get a job to support their children."

Warner, on the other hand, essentially elides the issue of class. She interviewed 150 women, mostly white, middle-class and college-educated. She offers a trickle-down theory of why it’s appropriate to leave working-class and poor women out of her analysis: everyone in the U.S. mimics the spending habits and competitiveness of the upper middle class. Through movies, magazines and advertising the upper middle class has become "our reference point for what the American good life is supposed to look like and contain."

True enough. But it’s a shaky assumption that just because poor and working-class women are exposed to the lifestyles and tastes of the wealthy they are also susceptible to the neuroses of the wealthy interviewed for the Mothers Movement Online, clinical psychologist Daphne de Marneffe suggests that it’s disingenuous to focus so narrowly on wealthy women’s "obsession with externals and appearances and competition" and then turn around and ask "Does anyone have an inner life?" The way you’ve picked your topic and constructed your argument guarantees that you’ve left out the very terms that could question and subvert and discredit the reality you’re describing."

Rarely have I read writers as witty and sardonic as Douglas and Michaels, who proudly call themselves "mothers with an attitude problem." I have a hunch Warner would also claim that label. Douglas and Michaels excoriate just about everybody they mention in their analysis of three decades of popular-culture representations of motherhood. Through detailed examination of TV shows, movies, news reports and women’s magazines, they make a convincing and disturbing case for the existence of the new momism. Yet in their irritation at the media’s veneration of the self-sacrificial mother. Douglas and Michaels end up revering "anti-mothers" on television like Peg Bundy of Married. . with Children and Rosanne Barr of Roseanne for their mouthy resistance to all things domestic and subservient. They also attribute negative intent -- or at least uncritical cultural consumption -- to everyone from conservative Christians (who are determined to "return all women to the barefoot-and-pregnant era of world history") to leftist attachment-parenting types (who are making "homemade baby lotion out of elderberry extract").

One could argue that such portraits are part and parcel of their hilariously hyperbolic writing style, but such obviously overdrawn characterizations reinforce the reader’s feeling that the authors’ only definition of a good mother is that of a mordant political activist with their particular brand of feminist conscience,

While I agree that the sacralization of motherhood has been harmful to women’s sense of themselves, I wonder whether the authors’ testy and sarcastic tone might end up paralyzing the very women they wish to empower. In their depiction of how media, politics and culture destabilize mothers’ selves, they risk obliterating the agency of the very women for whom they are advocating.

I, for one, emerged from the steel-wool abrasiveness of both books feeling rubbed raw, exhausted and, especially, angry: at advertisers and senators, at my husband for his professional successes, at myself for my choice to stay at home, and at my children for being, well, children. Apparently my life is a cliché -- the ‘70s girl turned careerist turned stay-at-home mom who has been duped by the media and abandoned by the government. Yet I still had no more knowledge about how to change anything -- and no more ability to do so -- than when I first opened each book. Despair and anger may be valid responses to the present predicament of women, but they aren’t always the greatest motivators.

Like these authors I find comfort in imagining a utopia in which the projects of making a family and making a living fit together more smoothly. And like them I have found sarcasm and disdain to be shields against the many pressures of 21st-century motherhood. But while I value their sociopolitical analyses and share their anger at the complex forces that make sane mothering almost impossible these days, I find little in their books to give me strength and hope for the journey -- the strength and hope that are exactly what mothers need to resist the powers the authors describe. Indeed, after reading about the plague of exhaustion facing mothers, I felt too exhausted to do much of anything.

Enter Carla Barnhill. Although her audience is narrower than those of the other authors -- she speaks mostly to women in evangelical Christian circles -- and her analysis is a tad simplistic, Barnhill writes with a pastoral style that is soothing after the acerbic tone of the other two volumes. She uses a language of faith that I hadn’t realized I was missing when I read the other two books. Although many readers will be put off by her evangelical jargon -- and I admit to some bewilderment at it -- I found her language reassuring in its emphasis on the family as something more than the nemesis of self-actualized women. Even as she resists churchly and societal constructions of the perfect mother, Barnhill acknowledges that mothers may be intentional about their nurturing and care-taking work for reasons other than a need to live up to some impossible cultural ideal.

In their scramble to free mothers from the demons of’ domesticity, Douglas and Michaels seem unwilling to acknowledge the value of parents intentionally creating family space and time and rituals that nurture children. Barn-hill doesn’t tell women to stay home baking bread and doing macramé. Far from it. She spends two chapters arguing that the church’s idolization of stay-at-home motherhood has heaped "minivan loads of guilt on [employed] women who are doing their best to manage their many roles" and who are doing the work to which God has called them. But she also doesn’t shy away from words like sacrifice and humility just because those words can be used against women.

Ironically, although Barnhill spends less time outlining the cultural and political forces that shape mothers’ realities, she does more to inspire me to action -- even political activism -- than the writers of the more explicitly political volumes.

After exploring how to resist the unique pressures that evangelical mothers face -- pressure to homeschool, to use corporal punishment, to view motherhood as their highest calling -- Barnhill fleshes out the idea of motherhood as a spiritual practice similar to prayer and fasting. Drawing on the work of philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, Barnhill encourages readers to view parenting as a spiritual practice through which God shapes us rather than as "a role filled with high expectations and the resultant disappointments." Citing examples of Christian mothers who were instrumental in the abolition of slavery and the passage of laws against child labor, she makes a strong case that virtues such as compassion and creativity that are "refined in the practice of motherhood can and should be used in other arenas to bring God’s love, peace, mercy and justice to the world." In other words, who I become as a mother can filter into other arenas of life, including activism on behalf of other mothers and their children.

Barnhill is not a scholar. She’s the editor of Christian Parenting Today, which situates her smack in the middle of evangelical America. For those not located in conservative Christian circles, her points will seem obvious and a bit pedestrian. Readers looking for a nuanced discussion of how the institution of motherhood has been constructed and maintained should go to one of the first two volumes. Yet Barnhill’s idea of parenting as a practice of spiritual formation offers a more profound possibility for resistance -- and even transformation -- than the other authors’ polemics. For example, the others admit to falling prey to the very phenomena they describe: "buying those black-and-white mobiles that allegedly turn your baby into Einstein Jr.," as Douglas and Michaels confess, or obsessing over whether to choose the basic or deluxe Hello Kitty birthday party package, as Warner acknowledges she has done. As Faulkner Fox puts it in her 2003 memoir, Dispatches from a Not-So-Perfect Life, "I could have written a great paper critiquing this kind of advertising and advice-wielding before I became a mother," but "as a mother, part of me fell subject to it."

Social criticism can loosen the ropes of this double consciousness. Yet as these authors admit, and as my friends and I find when we eschew middle-class momness, it cannot completely undo them. This is where Barnhill’s micro-level suggestions start to sound significant. Perhaps finding one’s identity in God’s love rather than in attainment of some extrinsic standard of perfection is more than the living out of a truism -- perhaps, in this climate of intensive mothering, it’s more like a survival skill. Maybe the idea of motherhood as a spiritual practice, in an era in which advertisers regard motherhood as a market, is a lot more political than it sounds.

This is a point to which I wish Barnhill had given more than cursory attention. Granted, her goal is smaller and more focused than those of the other authors: to "pull back the curtain on the lives of real women, women who feel stifled, stuck, and stranded by the expectations of Christian motherhood." Yet I think she gives too little consideration to the profound connection between mothers’ political activism and mothers’ spirituality, thereby missing an opportunity to contribute to the broader motherhood movement that is burgeoning outside of the church and could be strengthened by such a discussion.

One could argue that the recent spate of books on the stresses of motherhood amounts to just so much whining by a bevy of privileged, highly educated women with a surfeit of professional options and material wealth. But let’s hope that Barnhill’s vision is not entirely in vain. The formative practice of motherhood, even in America’s middle-class wasteland of competition and consumerism, might form women into more compassionate, caring -- and yes, even angry -- citizens who advocate on behalf of all women, especially those with fewer options. Through a holy blend of social criticism and spiritual fortitude, women with children might be able to resist the guilt and perfectionism that, if these authors are correct, are now the signatures of motherhood.

Global and Local

As the message of Pentecost spread, it adapted to fit existing cultures. Korean Pentecostals, for instance, frequently climb "prayer mountains" for pre-sunrise prayer services, a reflection of a pre-Christian past. At Yoido Full Gospel Church in Seoul, reputedly the world’s largest church, parishioners recite the Apostles’ Creed, pray or sing the Lord’s Prayer, and pray for the reunification of Korea every Sunday, reflecting something of the old Presbyterian majority. Preachers are expected to take off their shoes and don special slippers when they preach, for they stand on "holy ground." More pragmatically, during the service people are encouraged to pray aloud en masse in "concerts of prayer," but prayer stops the second a bell is rung. American Pentecostals would find such things almost unthinkable.

In much of Central and Eastern Europe, mirroring the practice of Orthodox Christians in the region, the men at Pentecostal services sit or stand on one side of the congregation while women sit or stand on the other, often with their heads covered. Some of them make the sign of the cross, and they share a common communion cup. While ample room is given for manifestations of tongues, interpretation and prophecy, frequently the congregation also sits through two or even three sermons in a single service.

In Scandinavia, the vast majority of Pentecostals are members of what amounts to a national Pentecostal church (of Norway, Sweden, Finland, etc.), in which each congregation is viewed as autonomous, though in recent years these churches’ monopoly has been slightly altered as newer groups have emerged. The situation becomes more complex, however, when one realizes that Pentecostals often hold dual membership in a state church (the state Lutheran Church, for example) in order to avoid marginalization in society. In Italy, many Pentecostals have aligned with the Communist Party because it is one of the few places where their influence can be measured over against that of the Catholic Church.

In Latin America, Pentecostals share a common culture with Roman Catholicism, out of which many members have come. The parallels at the level of personal piety and popular religion are abundant. One Pentecostal scholar has noted that in Latin America there are Catholics who honor the pope and Catholics (read: Pentecostals) without a pope, though many local pastors exercise more power among their people than any pope. While many Pentecostals in Latin America distance themselves from Catholicism, most of them remain close to the concepts of suffering and sacrifice seen in the Jesus figures on display in caskets, such as are found in Catholic churches in Mexico, or in the crucified Christ who appears on crucifixes. Some Pentecostals pray to Mary and the saints, avail themselves of "holy water," and leave the equivalent of milagros in crutches, braces, and wheelchairs as testimonies to God’s healing interventions. On a visit to the Basilica of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico City, I watched as women prayed while brushing their babies against fully dressed statues of the Virgin, bringing to mind the use of "healing handkerchiefs" among Pentecostals (see Acts 19:11-12). Some of the newer, indigenous Pentecostal denominations have embraced the "prosperity" gospel proclaimed by independent North American televangelists, but link their emphasis on prosperity to the "blood of Jesus," thereby aligning it with the more traditional Catholic theme of suffering.

In Africa, Pentecostal manifestations are even more diverse, Healing crusades, which have gone on for half a century, continue unabated. Independent megachurches led by gifted African pastors are common. Even among the poorer churches meeting in fields and forests, self-help programs, educational programs, computing classes and feeding programs are common. In postapartheid South Africa, churches that had been separated along racial lines have made progress toward integration, though any time spent with these people suggests that incredible pain remains for people of color and that racial tensions remain. Investment in the poor by those with more remains a begrudged priority. Still, there are a number of large, independent churches in and around Soweto that could teach American Pentecostals a thing or two about social concern. For them, this aspect of mission has been a matter of survival.

As Pentecostals celebrate their centennial, they are still far from realizing the potential of the movement as a truly global power. While many Pentecostals in Latin America and in Africa are becoming politically active, they continue to remain committed to historic understandings of the Christian faith. Issues such as abortion and the ordination of homosexuals that have become church-dividing for so many historic churches will not emerge as issues among Pentecostals in the foreseeable future. Their independent, entrepreneurial spirit will continue to be both their greatest strength and their greatest weakness as they seek new ways to connect with one another.

Pentecostalism‘s Dark Side

I was raised in a tiny Pentecostal denomination, the Open Bible Standard Churches, founded in part by disillusioned followers of 1930s revivalist Aimee Semple McPherson. My parents were Open Bible pastors, many of my uncles and aunts were missionaries, and one uncle served as the denomination’s president.

During my late teens and early 20s I was the quintessential Pentecostal preacher-boy. I first spoke in tongues at age 14, raised my hands in exuberant worship at revivals and camp meetings, witnessed to my friends at school and tried to convince Christian friends that they needed the "sign gift" of speaking in tongues to be fully Spirit-filled.

But in my high school years I began to be bothered by some Pentecostal teachings and practices. Eventually my doubts and questions led to a difficult departure from the spiritual movement of my youth; I became a Baptist immediately after graduating from a Baptist seminary at age 26. I recall breathing a great sigh of relief when I finally exited the Full Gospel movement, as we liked to call Pentecostalism. And yet, my heart was heavy because it meant leaving my spiritual home. And I knew my loved ones were all praying for me to recover my spiritual fervor.

Over the years I’ve met many other men and women who grew up in the thick of North American Pentecostalism and left it under similar circumstances and for similar reasons. Although the movement has matured since I turned in my Pentecostal credentials, it has a ways to go before it becomes a fully healthy and health-giving part of the Christian community.

I say this without rancor or bitterness, and I do not intend any harm to Pentecostal churches or individuals. The movement is still relatively young as religious movements go; I have confidence it will continue to mature. Some of my dearest friends are Pentecostals; I admire them for their passion and self-denial in the face of subtle persecution. In many places being Pentecostal is still wrongly considered tantamount to being a "hillbilly Holy Roller." People who think that way should take a look at the parking lots of many suburban Assemblies of God churches.

In this centennial year of American Pentecostalism’s founding, however, I feel compelled to register some concerns about its enduring immaturity as a movement. Some non-Pentecostal religious scholars, such as Harvey Cox (Fire from Heaven) and Philip Jenkins (The Next Christendom), have succumbed to "Pentecostal chic" -- a kind of romantic view of Pentecostalism as a much-needed spiritual movement of the poor and oppressed that fills the Western world’s "ecstasy deficit." Missing in some of these accounts is an awareness of the movement’s dark side.

Endemic to Pentecostalism is a profoundly anti-intellectual ethos. It is manifested in a deep suspicion of scholars and educators and especially biblical scholars and theologians. Yes, there are some Pentecostal scholars who are respected outside the movement: Russell Spittler served as a dean at Fuller Theological Seminary for years; Gordon Fee taught New Testament at Regent College in Vancouver and produced highly regarded volumes in biblical studies; Amos Yong holds a Ph.D. from Boston University and teaches in the doctoral program at Regent University Graduate School of Divinity. Yet too many Pentecostal leaders hold even their own scholars at arms length and view them with suspicion. Merely being a member of the Society for Pentecostal Studies often brings a Pentecostal scholar’s commitment to the movement into question.

This is without doubt the main reason I drifted away from the movement and eventually broke from it. I was not satisfied with the pat answers I was given by my mentors and teachers to questions I had about Pentecostal doctrines and practices.

For example: Billy Graham was and is a great hero to most Pentecostals, but he says he has never spoken in tongues. Is he not Spirit-filled? My questions on this issue were deftly turned aside, and subtle aspersions were cast on my spirituality merely for asking such questions. In the end, I was told that Graham is fully Spirit-filled even if he has never spoken in tongues. He’s the one exception. But were I to take up a career teaching theology in a Pentecostal college (I was told), I couldn’t teach that there might be exceptions to that distinctive doctrine. The cognitive dissonance wrought by this and other answers boggled my mind.

Not all Pentecostals are anti-intellectual or revel in incoherence. But a deep antipathy to critical rationality applied to theology is a hallmark of the movement. Too often spiritual abuse in the form of shame is directed at those, especially young people, who dare to question the teachings of highly placed Pentecostal ministers and evangelists.

I was one of the first Open Bible members to attend seminary and, like most Pentecostals who did that, I left the movement. I felt pushed out for wasting my time on intellectual pursuits rather than becoming a missionary or evangelist. Today evangelical seminaries are full of Pentecostal youths. Many of them still find doors closed when they return to their home denominations for ordination or for leadership positions in churches. Pentecostal scholars too often have to work outside Pentecostal institutions and live in the shadows and on the margins of the movement.

Shaking off this anti-intellectual attitude won’t be easy for the movement; it is part of Pentecostalism’s DNA. A good beginning would be to draw those Pentecostal scholars who work on the margins into the movement’s centers of power and leadership. Honest and open dialogue between Pentecostal leaders and the movement’s own intellectuals -- with promises there will be no negative consequences -- could help shake off some of the mutual suspicion and fear that haunts their relationships. And Pentecostal leaders need to pledge never again to subject eager, faithful and intellectually inclined young people to shame merely for asking tough questions about Pentecostal distinctives.

Another part of Pentecostalism’s dark side is rampant sexual and financial scandals. From early Pentecostal leader Charles Parham to Aimee Semple McPherson to Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart, the movement has been wracked by charges of misconduct, many of which have been substantiated by investigators.

In recent days a new scandal has been brewing over the conduct of Atlanta-based megachurch pastor Earl Paulk. Allegedly the Pentecostal bishop-pastor of the Cathedral of the Holy Spirit engaged in sex with several parishioners over a period of years. One accuser claims that he told her sex with him was necessary to revitalize his ministry and that he also lured her to engage in sex with a visiting pastor. Another woman brought a lawsuit claiming Paulk had sex with her when she was a teenager. Although Paulk has denied such charges and so far no verdicts have been delivered, the number and weight of the accusations add to the impression that not only Paulk but Pentecostalism has a problem with scandals.

Other Christian movements have suffered similar scandals, but Pentecostalism seems particularly rife with them. Insiders know some of the reasons. Deeply embedded within the Pentecostal movement’s ethos is a cult of personality; charismatic leaders are put on pedestals above accountability and are often virtually worshiped by many of their followers.

Too few courses in basic ethics are required in Pentecostal colleges (perhaps because many Pentecostals, especially older ones, assume that being Spirit-filled guarantees right behavior), and too many pastors handle the churches’ money and travel alone without having to account for their whereabouts or activities. It’s the movement’s own dirty little secret: sexual promiscuity and financial misconduct are rampant within its ranks, and little is done about this unless a scandal becomes public.

Several Pentecostal denominations have instituted policies to handle cases of pastoral moral turpitude and financial misconduct, but they have found those policies hard to enforce. At least one Pentecostal denomination has a policy that forbids investigation of charges that are more than five years old. One can only wonder why the leaders decided on that limit.

There is no body that regulates independent churches and ministers, but Pentecostal leaders could work harder to expose their colleagues who transgress and to warn their flocks (and others) against them. Far too much nervousness about powerful television and radio preachers infects well-intentioned and ethically sensitive Pentecostal leaders. It’s time for the movement to own up to its sometimes sleazy history and go the extra mile in cleaning house in the cases of ministers and evangelists who are less than honest and chaste. It should not be left to publications like Christianity Today and Charisma to reveal scandals involving Pentecostal ministers, evangelists and denominational executives.

Still another aspect of Pentecostalism’s dark side is its tendency to condone dishonesty on the part of influential and popular evangelists and ministers. One day I was browsing through the books at a publishers’ overstock sale and came across the autobiography of a Pentecostal evangelist who held tent revival meetings in the small Midwestern city where I grew up. I remembered his rather farfetched sermon illustrations of miraculous occurrences in his life and ministry. The book contained a chapter on a miracle that supposedly happened during his revival in our town.

When I read his account of the incident I was shocked but not surprised; I had encountered enough similar evangelistic stretchings of truth to know they are rampant in revivalist and perhaps especially in Pentecostal circles. According to the evangelist, a high wind caused by a tornado reduced buildings around his revival tent to rubble but left his tent undamaged. He even claimed that local television crews filmed the aftermath of the storm and his intact tent.

What I vividly recall is a windstorm that sent men from our church to the tent in the middle of the night; they held it down as the winds whipped its sides. But no tornado touched down near it and no buildings around it were destroyed. I would have remembered if they had been. That evangelist is probably still traveling around telling his tall tales and whipping up fervor and offerings. Denominational leaders to whom he is accountable need to challenge his exaggerations and insist on honesty. To the best of my knowledge they have not done so.

Playing fast and loose with truth is rampant in Pentecostal circles, and is excused and even joked about as "speaking evangelistically." Numbers are inflated and stories of healings exaggerated if not invented. To be sure, many Pentecostal ministers are honest and truthful. One thinks of noted Full Gospel pastor, speaker and writer Jack Hayford, who was labeled "The Pentecostal Gold Standard" by Christianity Today. Would that all Pentecostal ministers were as squeaky clean and honest as Hayford. The movement’s leaders could do more to ensure that.

As a former insider, I know that Pentecostal leaders reading this article are defensively bristling at what they know is true about their movement. Telling it publicly either inside the movement or to outsiders is considered traitorous behavior. As one denominational leader told me, "If you see a problem among the leaders you should pray to God about it and keep it to yourself, you have no business challenging them or making it public." This is a common attitude among Pentecostals.

A favorite Pentecostal saying is "Touch not God’s anointed" (a paraphrase of Psalm 105:15). The saying is meant to forbid criticism of the movement’s leaders. When I was a boy the worst label my parents and Pentecostal relatives could put on a person within the movement was "critical" or "negative." Too often Full Gospel leaders insist on total, abject loyalty and uncritical acceptance of whatever they say. Too many Pentecostal organizations lack any structure for safe criticism of dysfunctional behavior, aberrant teaching or abusive practices on the part of leaders and powerful ministers.

Pentecostal leaders need to take the next step in the movement’s maturation process and institute safe means of criticism and correction within their organizations. They need to become more self-critical and less defensive of leaders’ positions and pronouncements. A hallmark of spiritual abuse is treating the person who dares to point out a problem as the problem. Such behavior is widespread in Pentecostal circles. Full Gospel leaders can prove that their movement is coming of age in its second century by establishing means by which their denominations and organizations can nurture healthy self-examination, allowing constructive criticism with impunity even by younger members.

One example of this happening is the "Memphis Miracle." Some Pentecostal leaders knew that racism plagued their movement and determined to do something about it. They did little while the older guard was still alive, but once the senior leaders who practiced racism (e.g. by excluding black denominations from the Pentecostal Fellowship of North America) died or went into retirement they exposed the problem and proposed a radical solution: disband the PFNA and ask African-American Pentecostal leaders to start a new umbrella association for Pentecostal cooperation and, if they wanted to, to invite white Pentecostals into it. That is what happened. The new group founded in Memphis in 1994, the Pentecostal and Charismatic Churches of North America, includes approximately 40 denominations and networks of churches. It was started by black Pentecostals, who graciously invited their white brothers and sisters into it. This is a model of the kind of self-criticism that should characterize a maturing Pentecostal movement to a greater extent.

In spite of exposing the continuing dark side of the movement born on Azusa Street a century ago, I love Pentecostalism. They say you can take the boy out of Pentecostalism but you can’t take Pentecostalism out of the boy. Most of the formerly Full Gospel men and women I know still remember fondly the excitement and passion of the movement. Some of us listen to Pentecostal music on CDs and occasionally raise our hands or clap to its ecstatic words and beat. But I long to see the movement that taught me to love Jesus and the Bible mature further in the ways I’ve outlined here. It is happening, but too slowly.

Dose of Forgiveness

In the play A Thousand Clowns by Herb Gardner, a character named Murray discovers that he can offer a simple apology to almost anyone -- even a complete stranger -- and he or she will forgive him. He stands on the corner of 51st and Lexington in New York City one day, telling those who walk by him, "I’m sorry," and in almost every instance, he’s forgiven on the spot. "That’s the most you can expect from life," he muses, "a really good apology for all the things you won’t get."

I hope that’s not true. I wonder, though, what would have happened if Murray had stood on the street corner telling passers -by that he forgave them. The responses probably wouldn’t have been so warm; some might have brought on downright hostility. Though most of us can readily imagine that we’re owed an apology for something (and perhaps lots of somethings), admitting that we’ve done anything that requires forgiveness comes less easily.

How did the paralyzed man feel, for instance, when Jesus said, "Son, your sins are forgiven"? Did he wonder what his sins were? Did he feel defensive? Or search his memory for the particular s in that might have been bad enough to result in paralysis? Was he simply outraged? We don’t know. Mark tells us nothing about this man or his response to Jesus, but is there anyone who doesn’t need God’s forgiveness, who doesn’t need to be reminded that God has already forgiven us, no matter what?

Perhaps the man with the paralysis felt like those who were listening to God in the passage from Isaiah. God, speaking in Isaiah of all the new things that are about to spring forth, gets a lukewarm response. In words reminiscent of Exodus, God invites the people to go out into the wilderness again -- though without the endless thirst of the Israelites who left Egypt -- and it seems the people ignore the invitation, or at least put off accepting it outright. They don’t bother to bring God their offerings of thanks; they just keep sinning. And yet God not only forgives them, but vows not to remember their sins. What are we to make of a God who indiscriminately forgives our sins?

For me these two stories highlight everything about forgiveness that I find challenging. First, there’s the Santa Claus problem: God knows already if we’ve been naughty or nice. I hate that. Like Cain I want to conceal my sins from God.

And then there’s that unconditional-forgiveness problem, to which I have one of two responses. The first is to deny I did whatever it is I’m accused of doing. There is something in most of us which fears that if we admit what we’ve done God will take back the forgiveness -- that God’s granting forgiveness was just a ploy to get us to tell the truth, and that once we do that we’re really gonna get it.

At other times I feel unworthy of God’s forgiveness. A friend of mine used to talk about "worm theology," the belief that we are all worms unworthy of God’s attention. Forgiveness flies in the face of worm theology. God’s forgiveness implies that God loves us and wants to continue in relationship with us no matter what we’ve done. When we think about this possibility, we may find it impossible to imagine (that’s also what makes it good news). Sometimes God’s love and forgiveness are even harder to fathom on the national and international scene. That God loves and forgives those who starve or kill or harm others on a massive scale is difficult to comprehend, and even harder to accept.

It is our acceptance of God’s forgiveness that makes the process complete. God forgives us no matter what; there’s nothing we can do to induce or prevent that. But it is in conquering our fear of being unworthy, or our fear that God won’t love us anymore if we confess what God already knows, that forgiveness takes root. Like the psalmist, we must be willing to say, "O Lord, be gracious to me; heal me, for I have sinned against you." When we can do that the cycle of forgiveness is complete; we have not only received God’s forgiveness, but accepted it. Now healing and change can occur.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu demonstrated the power of this in South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which worked for the healing of the country. By providing a forum in which those who had victimized and harmed others could confess, Tutu’s commission opened up a way for completing the cycle of forgiveness. "We are looking to the healing of relationships," Tutu said in a PBS interview. "We are seeking to open wounds, yes, but to open them so that we can cleanse them and they don’t fester; we cleanse them and then pour oil on them, and then we can move into the glorious future that God is opening up for us."

And so Murray was wrong: a good apology is not the best we can expect in this life. True, we do well to give a good apology -- to God and to those we have harmed. But the best thing we can expect in this life -- and it is already promised and given -- is a good dose of forgiveness. God stands on every street corner 24 hours a day and seven days a week, telling each of us, "You are forgiven." The only question is how we will respond.

Healed, Not Cured (2 Kg. 5:1-14; Ps. 30; Mk. 1:40-45)

They both were angry, and they had a right to be angry. Judy’s mother was chronically ill, and would be for the rest of her life. As an only child Judy felt responsible, and she did her duty, caring for her mother without assistance. She counted the cost all the way, exhausting people around her by eliciting sympathy from them, and then moving on to others. Judy talked often about what kind of help she needed, but she never actually looked for help. She had decided that God had willed her a difficult life, and that nothing would be good again until after her mother died and Judy was relieved of her burden.

Bill was suffering too. Like his other siblings, he had cystic fibrosis, a disease that would kill him in middle age. He had already watched his two teenage siblings die. Like Job, he railed at God, wanting to know what he and his family had done to deserve such a horrible sentence. He wanted a trial, a forum where he could be proven innocent. More than anything, he wanted God to show up and solve things. If God was good, God would heal him: otherwise God was not good.

Watching people struggle with suffering and hopes for healing leaves the rest of us feeling helpless. What can we say to them? In the midst of pain most of us want answers, and we want direction -- clear steps to take that lead to a predictable result. But that’s not what the week’s lectionary texts give us.

The psalmist apparently solved his problems with a threat: "What profit is there in my death? Will the dust praise you?" It seems to have worked for him; God turned his mourning into joy, and the psalmist offered God praise.

Naaman, on the other hand, needed more coaching. He was important, the commander of an army, so who was Elisha to send a messenger with instructions instead of coming personally? If it hadn’t been for Naaman’s servants, who convinced him to follow the instructions despite his bruised ego, Naaman would have walked away.

And then there’s the leper in Mark, whose line resonates so deeply: "If you choose, you can make me clean." The leper’s bold vulnerability brings us up short, perhaps because that much openness is truly frightening, or perhaps because his courage inspires us.

So what’s the sure-fire prescription for obtaining a cure? Threatening, washing, begging? Threatening God doesn’t seem like the best strategy, but then again, God responded to the psalmist. Washing? Of the three characters in these stories, Naaman is the least sympathetic. Yet he gets a prescription: he’s told to wash in the Jordan seven times.

Begging? The story from Mark is perhaps the most troubling. Although Jesus heals the leper, we all know instances in which someone who genuinely desires healing has asked and not been cured. This story easily turns into an accusation: "It is only your own faithlessness that keeps you from being well," it seems to say. That’s what some folks told Bill about his cystic fibrosis. And yet, we can’t entirely walk away from this story either. The leper’s cry is too plaintive; it catches at our heart strings. Which of us doesn’t want to hope that all we have to do is ask and a cure will follow?

So much for a simple step-by-step, no-fail prescription. Perhaps what these stories have in common is that each man was cured by engaging with God. In the biblical texts they are cured -- that is, their bodily ailments are remedied -- but the texts seem to imply that they were also healed; they came to know a place of peace and joy in God’s presence. We can opt out of this process, as Naaman almost did: God doesn’t force anyone to be healed.

As I watch people who suffer, engagement seems to be the only constant that brings about true healing. We may or may not be cured by engaging and wrestling with God, but we will be healed. The difficulty is that engagement is hard work, and the vulnerability it requires is terrifying. Because Judy has decided that God wants her to be miserable, she has cut herself off from conversation with God and written her own prescription: her mother’s death is the solution for her troubles. I suspect God will have a hard time talking her out of that for the near future.

Bill, on the other hand, wrestled with God until he got an answer. He wanted to know how anyone could call God good, and he stayed in the conversation – sometimes with anger and other times through tears -- until he heard something other than silence. Two weeks before he died Bill spent an hour telling me how blessed his life had been. He was never cured of his disease, but he was healed. He died knowing that God loved him deeply.

Engaging with God is hard work, as Jacob and Job can attest. It’s more often like a wrestling match than a civilized conversation. If we’re being truthful, we’d have to admit that we want a simpler prescription -- a pill to take. We don’t want to be vulnerable with God. Deciding that God wills our own or others’ suffering, as Judy has done, can be easier than boldly demanding an explanation or cure we might not receive, or might not like. Yet it is only through openly engaging with God that we find our healing. "Oh Lord, be my helper!" demands the psalmist. "If you choose," begs the leper. Engaging with God, remaining in the conversation until we get an answer, is the only way to turn our own mourning and the mourning in the world around us into dancing, and to transform the sackcloth we wear into joy.

Slain by the Music

The images abound in stock video footage accompanying stories on evangelicals, the religious right, megachurches and the culture wars -- the obligatory shots of middle-class worshipers, usually white, in corporate-looking auditoriums or sanctuaries, swaying to the electrified music of "praise bands," their eyes closed, their enraptured faces tilted heavenward, a hand (or hands) raised to the sky. Although the journalistic patter accompanying such footage is often akin in tone to that found in documentaries about Amazonian tribal rituals, the images highlight an ever-growing reality of the past three decades: the spread of Pentecostal and charismatic worship styles and music into ecclesiastical settings that were once resistant -- if not downright hostile -- to the up-tempo, emotional music of the Pentecostal ethos.

This expansion has hardly been a triumphal march, and it has been anything but direct or one-sided. Nonetheless, the manner in which it has come to pass bespeaks both the changing nature of American religion and the changing status of American Pentecostals.

To outsiders, Pentecostal worship services have long been a sight and sound to behold and hear. What Duke Divinity School historian Grant Wacker dubbed the "planned spontaneity" of Pentecostal worship struck early-20th-century monitors as little more than chaos. And while the startling sounds of glossolalia and the shock of seeing believers "slain in the Spirit" jarred mainstream observers, the sprightly music that accompanied it all was likewise the object of wonder. Preachers and songleaders used singing to both inflame the spiritual fervor of their congregations and cool it down as needed. Such was the distance from mainstream Protestant music that a musicologist observing a biracial gathering of the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee) in 1929 could only describe the music he heard there as a "steady and almost terrifying rhythmic noise."

Rhythm and innovation were certainly hallmarks of the early Pentecostal musical ethos. With what amounted to a near open-door policy in terms of instrumentation, many Pentecostals welcomed not only the brass and horns of their Holiness-influenced Salvation Army cousins, but guitars, banjos, accordions, fiddles and even drums into their Holy Ghost- charged services.

Early Pentecostal patriarch Howard Goss recognized that Pentecostals were doing something very different with their music and that this fact was key to the movement’s growth. Looking back in the 1950s, he noted that Pentecostals "were the first . . . to introduce this accelerated tempo into gospel singing" and contended that without the new musical style "the Pentecostal Movement could never have made the rapid inroads into the hearts of men and women as it did."

With an inborn resistance to formal worship styles and looking to music as a means to evangelization, Pentecostals remained open to innovation through the interwar years and into the 1950s. Indeed, it was among the Pentecostal segment of the southern white and African-American population during this period that the great boom in the various forms of commercially viable Gospel music took hold, accelerated, and then spread with the migrations north.

However, while the new Gospel music(s) found great favor in the South and among the migrants of the southern diaspora, the music was often the target of scorn outside the South. Black Gospel found a limited -- and mostly secular -- audience among white listeners, but southern white Gospel was routinely panned as vulgar," "hillbilly" and "western" style music, even by conservative evangelicals in the North. Such was the reputation of this music that the editors of Christian Life magazine, based in Wheaton, Illinois, created a firestorm among its readers in late 1955 with a favorable article about Memphis’s famous Sunday night Gospel Sing.

Those concerts -- which had earlier been frequented by a young Assembly of God teen named Elvis Presley -- were emblematic of an important new phenomenon that occurred in the 1950s the leaking of Pentecostal musical forms and style, via Gospel music, not into the larger church but into the world of popular music. The raw power of Gospel provided the emotional -- and no small part of the musical -- muscle that fueled both rock ‘n’ roll and R & B as it evolved into soul.

Despite the new music’s heritage, Pentecostals knew that a sacred divide had been breached; both the young Jerry Lee Lewis (who had been booted out of an Assembly of God Bible school in Texas in 1952 for playing a too-raucous version of "My God Is Real") and his preacher cousin Jimmy Swaggart believed that "Great Balls of Fire" was dragging both singer and audience into hellfire.

As the 1960s dawned, a number of new trends arose that altered the relationship between Pentecostalism, other elements of the Christian church, and American culture. Each of these trends would in turn have musical implications within and outside of the Pentecostal camp.

First was the rather surprising advent of the charismatic movement within mainline Protestant denominations and the Roman Catholic Church. Pentecostals wrestled with the conundrums presented by alcohol-imbibing, dancing, "worldly" Lutherans and Catholics speaking in tongues and being slain in the Spirit. In the process they found themselves in contact with people who not only had musical tastes that were more to the liturgical side, but who -- even when seeking worship "reform" -- looked to the developing body of folk masses and new hymnody rather than to the Fanny Crosby -- Ira Sankey -- Francis Havergal -- Homer Rodeheaver canon or the world of Gospel music. Inevitably, the two sides of the Pentecostal-charismatic divide swapped musical DNA.

A second force at work was the growing power, prosperity and respectability of Pentecostals themselves. Increasingly a force within the world of televised religion, Pentecostals adapted their musical presentations to the expectations of American TV audiences. Televangelists such as Oral Roberts demonstrated that they could clean up nicely for the folks out in TV-land, shifting their musical presentation away from gospel quartet and hymns and toward well-coiffed crooners and troupes of well-scrubbed young people whose musical presentation was one part Up with People, one part Hollywood Palace and one part Peter, Paul and Mary. Just as the charismatic movement introduced the musical influence of mainstream American Christianity back into Pentecostal circles, the new, respectable Pentecostals could not help absorbing the entertainment tastes of Silent Majority America.

But it was at this juncture that a third, unexpected development injected the forbidden worldly extremes of rock ‘n’ roll back into Pentecostalism: the rise of the countercultural -- and decidedly Pentecostal-leaning -- Jesus People movement at the turn of the 1970s. Spirit-filled "Jesus Rock" bands and a slew of singer-songwriter coffeehouse troubadours sprang up all across the country. The Jesus People’s musical influences were all over the map -- from the likes of the Beatles to the evangelical Ralph Carmichael’s youth musicals, from Led Zeppelin to James Taylor -- and taken together they laid the groundwork for the rise of what would become the Contemporary Christian Music industry.

The most influential aspect of this movement for both Pentecostals and the larger American church were the musical developments that grew out of the Jesus People happenings at Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa, California. There the balding, self-effacing personage of Pastor Chuck Smith (himself raised in Aimee Semple McPherson’s International Church of the Foursquare Gospel) presided over the transformation of his small, independent church into a magnet for Orange County’s hippies, beach bums and teenagers. Key to his success was the latitude he gave the teenagers to play music they wrote themselves, The resultant "Calvary Chapel sound" was equal parts folk, pop and light rock -- simple songs and choruses that, in the recollection of one early musician at Calvary, "sung themselves."

The sounds were first captured on the Everlastin’ Living Jesus Music Concert album, which Smith made with $2,500 of his own money in early 1971. The record sold hundreds of thousands of copies and led to the incorporation of Maranatha! Music, which via records, song-books, chorus sheets and overhead slides began to spread the mellow sounds of the "praise revolution" across North America and the world during the 1970s and ‘80s.

The rather vanilla folk -- pop -- adult contemporary rock stylings of Maranatha! praise music -- buttressed by output from Calvary Chapel’s stepdaughter, the Vineyard International Fellowship, and any number of praise-oriented companies spawned by evangelical music publishers; by the wildly popular imported oeuvre of Australia’s HillSongs Church; and by the work of British praise tunesmiths such as Graham Kendrick, Chris Eaton and the band Delirious -- have now conquered thousands of American congregations.

Indeed, an argument could be made that at no time since the First Great Awakening have so many churches of disparate denominational, theological and stylistic approaches been so united in terms of their music: one can now walk into old-line Pentecostal churches, small-town evangelical congregations, mall-like suburban megachurches, and many a mainline Protestant sanctuary across the country on any given Sunday morning and hear the same hymns and choruses done in approximately the same musical styles, with similar settings and instrumentation.

Of course, the success of the new music has created an opposite -- and, if not quite equal, certainly vocal -- reaction among adherents of other styles of church music. Proponents of classic hymns and choral music, scions of alternative new hymnody and "world music," and lovers of the good ol’ "Sankey Doodle" gospel songs have all registered their dismay, as evidenced by the infamous "worship wars" which have plagued churches in recent years. Marva Dawn (most famously) and many pastors, theologians, seminary music professors and church music directors have decried the new "praise music" as so much pap at any level -- musical, theological, emotional, intellectual.

And yet, despite the counterattacks of these latter-day Lowell Masons, the new music continues to gain ground (even the CCM charts are increasingly selecting praise-oriented songs and choruses over stand-alone "Christian rock" tunes), and probably a majority of worship-war plagued churches simply agree to disagree by offering "blended worship" or (in the case of larger churches) serving up multiple worship services cafeteria-style.

Undoubtedly, any pre-WWI-era Pentecostal worshipers who dropped into a modern-day praise chorus worship session at First Presbyterian would find much that seems strange beyond the electrified instrumentation. If anything, they would probably find the atmosphere much too mellow for their liking. But other elements of the musical trend -- its emphasis on the personal connection between the believer and God, its popular bent, its triumphant spread through the churches, and the very fact that many of the "frozen chosen" find the music divisive and beneath them -- would probably strike the early Pentecostals as warmly reassuring.

Handshake Ritual

Worship is over and I am standing in the door way shaking hands. In front of me is a couple I do not recall seeing before. I say, "Good morning! I’m Martin Copenhaver." By my manner and my tone of voice you might think that I am greeting long-lost friends, rather than introducing myself to these people for the first time. The woman of the couple responds, "Good to meet you. We are Jill and Bob Townsend."

"Welcome. So good to have you here." I think, Focus on their names. Catch the names before they simply drop to the floor. But while I am chatting with the new couple I see out of the corner of my eye the person next in line, whose grandmother just died. I give a nod in her direction to let her know that I want to speak with her, but not yet. I need to be attentive to the new couple for at least a few more moments: "Are you new to the area or just new to us?" What is their name? Townsend! Whew. Still got it. My thoughts spin back toward the one who is next in line and I begin to second-guess myself. Wait, was it her grandmother who died or her grandfather? Actually, I think it was her grandfather. And then my mind lights ever so briefly on the person she is talking to, a parishioner I have not seen in worship in some time. I think, It’s been, what… almost a year? I wonder why she is back today. But I need to stay focused on the new couple. Quick, file away their names before you lose them. Townsend. I can remember that because they are "new in town." Jill Townsend says, "We’ve lived here for years, but we’re looking at other churches." OK, Townsend, as in "not new in town." I say, "Well, I hope you can stay for some coffee." She smiles and says, "Not today, but I’m sure we will be back." I look for someone to introduce them to, but they are out the door before I have a chance.

Next is the woman who lost her grandfather. Or was it her grandmother? I say, "I’m so sorry to hear about your loss." She says, "Thanks. I so appreciate that. But it was a blessing." I ask, "Was your whole family able to gather for the service?" It’s a rather lame question, but I am stalling for time, hoping that she will drop a personal pronoun. Before she can respond, my teenage son comes up behind me and drapes his arms over my shoulders: "Dad, you know you want to give me money so I can get something at the bake sale." Normally I would remind him that this is no way to ask me for something, but I don’t have time for a lesson in manners. "Sure, Todd, here." I give him a ten-dollar bill. It’s all I have. "Thanks, Dad."

I turn back to the grieving grandchild. She says, "Yes, the whole clan gathered. He would have been very pleased." I should have remembered that it was her grandfather. I say, "Well, I know you were very close to him. We will continue to hold you in our prayers." She responds, "Thank you. And you know Mary, don’t you?" indicating the member of the flock who has been missing in action. And I do remember her very well. I say, "Of course. It’s great to see you, Mary." Mary says, "Yeah, well, I haven’t been around for a while. There’s just been a whole lot going in my life." I think, OK, there’s something to follow up on. I say, "Well, it would be good to catch up when you have a chance." She says, "Sure. Any time." Using a common pastoral way of closing a conversation, I say, "I’ll call you." And then I hope I remember to call.

A teenager approaches with a cast on his right arm. I search my memory: Did he have that cast on last week? I playfully extend my right elbow and he does the same. As our elbows touch we share a little laugh. I say, "How are you hanging in there?" He responds, "OK. I broke it playing soccer." So the cast is something new. I ask him how it happened and he tells me the story. When he is finished I put my hand on his shoulder and say, "I’m so sorry. But you should see the other guy, right? I’m just glad you play soccer instead of tennis so that you can keep at it."

A man about ten years younger than I, who has been waiting in the wings, suddenly steps forward for his moment: "You don’t remember me, do you?" He does look rather familiar, but in the way a person can remind you of someone else you know. He bails me out: "I was in the first confirmation class you taught, 25 years ago." I say, "Of course I remember you. Absolutely. But I have become very bad with names in my old age. Help me with yours." He replies, "I’m Scott Harrison." Shaking my head in contrition, I say, "Of course you’re Scott Harrison. Absolutely, I remember you. That was a great confirmation class. How have you been?" Then, after a few more snippets of conversation, I offer him my hand again as a way to draw this conversation to a close.

Someone else approaches who says, "I really have to take issue with your sermon today." I say, "The sermon is just the beginning. Then comes the conversation, which often is the best part." He says, "Well, maybe that’s a conversation we’ll have." I say, "Great. I welcome that. Will you call me?" In this instance I want to put the onus on him to call.

That entire sequence lasts only about 90 seconds, but it contains worlds within worlds. And that represents only a small portion of the line of people who wait to shake my hand. No wonder I come home from worship ready for a nap.

I do think that the sermon is just the beginning, that one sign a sermon has done its work is that it prompts continued conversation. And I do remember that confirmation class of 25 years ago. Sort of. I really do want to offer a word of comfort to the person who has just lost a loved one. In the moment I may not remember whether it was that person’s grandmother or grandfather, but it is a loss that needs to be acknowledged. I want to make the newcomers feel welcome, as well as the person I have not seen in 25 years. I really do want to remember everyone’s name. It’s not merely that I want people to know I care, although that is part of it. I want each person who comes through the line to experience something of the embracing love of God. After all, not a sparrow falls without God’s knowing and caring. Then again, sparrows do not have names and I am not God.

Through the years I have learned the historical and theological foundations of practically every word and gesture in the liturgy, but no one has ever explained to me why pastors stand in doorways and shake hands with worshipers following worship. I just know that you better do it. It is an essential part of Sunday morning. If after worship one Sunday, rather than stopping at the door to shake hands, I went directly to my study instead, I imagine that there would be a bit of confusion and perhaps even some grumbling, as if something were terribly amiss.

One reason the ritual of shaking hands after worship seems indispensable is easy to identify: it is an intensely concentrated time of interaction. As a pastor, you learn a lot about what is going on in your parishioners lives while shaking hands--much of it mundane, but some of it momentous as well. People often are willing to say remarkable things at such a moment. Perhaps that is because, with their hearts fresh from worship, they are more willing to take risks. Perhaps it is because they can say something quickly and then immediately leave without having to face an extended conversation. Perhaps it is simply because they are seizing the moment.

There was the man who said, as dispassionately as if he were reporting on the certainty of rain that afternoon, "The doctor has given me three months to live." Or the woman who looked at me with begging eyes and said, "I just learned that my son is a drug addict." Or the man who was barely able to get out the words, "My wife left me last night," before collapsing in my arms. I do not remember how I responded, but I vividly recall their words.

Then there was the time when a woman I had never seen before, obviously great with child, stopped at the door and rubbed her belly with what I took to be both wonder and pride, and asked, "Will you bless my baby?" I hesitated, not because I was reluctant to offer a blessing, but because I wasn’t exactly sure how to go about it. So I asked, "Do you have a picture of how you would like me to do that?" She responded, as if giving me remedial instructions, "Well, I’m not sure exactly, but I would like you to put your hand over the baby and say a prayer." So I put one hand on her shoulder, the other on her belly, and I offered a prayer. It was a brief prayer, but before I finished, the line at the door had turned into an intimate little circle around the bold expectant mother and the suddenly shy pastor.

In much of our worship there can be so many words offered, often at a distance, from talking heads that peer over pulpits--like television newscasters who seem to exist only from the shoulders up--that one can get the impression that worship is about disembodied words. But the ritual of shaking hands--not to mention putting your hand on the belly of a woman you have never met before--reminds us that the Christian faith is insistently incarnational. The word is always enfleshed -- in Jesus, of course, but in the preacher and the worshiper as well.

Not all of it is that serious. Every preacher I know has a collection of memorable comments that have been made by parishioners as they shake hands following worship. Perhaps the most prized example in my own collection is the comment I received not long after seminary from a man who said to me. "You know, Martin, every sermon seems better than the next one." He was in his car and driving away before I realized what he had said.

There are the comments that every preacher has heard that communicate in a kind of code. Someone says, "I wish my sister were here to hear that sermon. I’ve been saying something like that for years." Translation: "She has stopped listening to me. Maybe you can get through to her."

Someone else says, "Well, you certainly gave us a lot to think about." Translation: "I don’t agree with what you said this morning." Alternative translation: "I didn’t understand what on earth you were talking about."

Or someone speaks about what a sermon meant to him and paraphrases what he found so helpful--and it seems as if he is talking about someone else’s sermon. The thought that he is so joyfully carrying away is not the thought I meant to convey. When that happens I wonder: is that merely an example of someone hearing what he wanted to hear, or is it an indication that the Holy Spirit has taken my words and spoken through them in ways I did not intend?

Then there are the various compliments one receives for one’s sermons which, when I started in ministry, I used to prize like glittering gifts. These days I am more likely to question their value. Now when someone shakes my hand and says something like, "That was a wonderful sermon," I want to hold on to that person’s hand for an extra moment and ask, "Yes, but what did it do?" I remember one of my professors saying, "We have too many preachers who want to hear their parishioners say, ‘What a great preacher we have,’ and not enough who long to hear them say, ‘What a great God we have.’"

When preachers stand in doorways and shake hands it is a reminder that the clergy are not performers and the congregation is not an audience. Rather, in worship we are all performers before the true audience of worship--that is, God. Some preachers--mostly the celebrity preachers, the leaders of megachurches--do not shake hands. I can see why. Celebrity requires some distance and at least a dash of illusion.

In the theater there is a tradition that actors are not to be seen by the audience before or after a performance, and particularly not in costume. A certain illusion is to be maintained that requires some kind of divide between player and audience. If, for instance, you see the actor who is playing King Lear munching on a bagel backstage before the curtain goes up, it will be more difficult to fully accept the actor as Lear once the play begins. Also, it would be odd, and more than a bit disconcerting, to have Lear and his daughters greeting theatergoers at the door following the performance. Actors collaborate with members of the audience to create, for a time at least, a kind of illusion that they are the characters they play. Anything that exposes that illusion is usually unwelcome.

As a preacher who shakes hands, I believe worship leaders have a quite different job: to expose illusions at every turn, including the illusion that they are something more than fellow players in the drama of worship. Shaking hands after worship is one way of putting the worship leaders in their place.

I have learned that this is a time in which the worshipers rightfully take charge. The preacher has had a chance to speak, sometimes at great length and perhaps from a high pulpit that is "‘six feet above contradiction," as one parishioner of mine wryly put it. During worship the members of the congregation have sat in silence or have read words that someone else has written for them. This moment of greeting the worship leader is an opportunity for them to offer their own words. It is a chance to say a word about their lives as a kind of testimony in miniature or to add a coda to the sermon by pointing out something that, in their opinion, the preacher left out or got wrong.

On the eve of the Gulf War, I preached a sermon in which I expressed my opposition to the imminent invasion. I did not want to use the pulpit merely as a soapbox from which to expound my political views. I wanted the people in my congregation to hear a reflection on the war that they would not find in the editorial pages, to help them think about the issues as Christians, not merely as citizens. So I was careful to interpret my opposition to the war through my understanding of both scripture and Christian tradition. I spent a good deal of time preparing that sermon and I delivered it with confidence, even though I knew that there would be many in the congregation who would take issue with it, because I believed that what I was saying had integrity.

After worship I shook hands at the door. Some people found various ways to tell me that they agreed with me. Others wanted to let me know that they did not. Many did not comment at all on the sermon, which left me free to interpret their reactions. Then one older member of my congregation approached me, a retired general who was normally quite soft-spoken. I don’t remember what he said. I just remember how angry he was. I do remember what I said in response: "Reg, you are a military man. You of all people understand the chain of command. Well, in the chain of command I am obliged to follow the orders of Jesus. And that’s all I was trying to do this morning in saying what I did--obey orders."

I do not even remember what he said after that. I just know that I immediately regretted saying anything. I had already had my turn to speak. This was my turn to listen.

Starting Over (Gen. 9:8-17; 1 Pet. 3:18-22; Mk. 1:9-5)

 "God waited patiently in the days of Noah . . . in which a few, that is, eight persons, were saved through water. And baptism, which this prefigured, now saves you." (1 Peter 3:21)

Sometimes I’m watching TV news and reach the point where I cannot take in all the violence and destruction. So I turn off the television and try to get involved in something that will take my mind off the news.

God, however, does not have that option. God does not have a remote control to change the channels. God cannot move to the suburbs or close a door to hide from the violence. God’s eyes are not averted. God’s heart is not numbed. We see only the thinnest slice of human violence and sometimes despair. But God sees it all. If Noah’s age was anything like our own, no wonder God said, "That’s it. I’ve seen enough. I declare a misdeal. Let’s start over again."

Noah and his family were spared because they seemed like decent folks caught up in a violent world they did not create. Although we do not know much about their character, God seemed to think that they represented everything that was good and worth saving about creation. When they were safely aboard the ark, God sent a flood until the world was immersed in a cleansing bath, so that new life could begin in the watery womb called Earth.

I imagine that when the flood was over, Noah and his family, the last remaining seed of the human race, did not want to wander very far from the ark. If the rains started again, they would have to slosh through the mud to get back on board.

But while they were still wobbling around on sea legs, God said, "I am establishing my covenant with you." That is, "I am committing myself to you. I am going to stick with you no matter what. And as I am my witness, I am never going to send a flood like this again. In fact, I am going to give myself a reminder of this promise. I am going to hang up my bow in the sky [the word in Hebrew refers to the kind of bow that shoots arrows], but this bow will be empty of arrows. I will never use it again to visit terror upon you. I am more sick of violence than anyone, so I will be the first to lay down my arms. There will be times when you and those who follow will disappoint me, and I may be tempted to send another flood, but this bow in the sky will remind me of what I am saying to you now."

It is a good thing that God made that binding, irreversible commitment to stick with us no matter what, to refrain from destroying us no matter what we do, because look at us now. All we have to do is take in the human scene to see that when Noah and his family got on the ark, something was smuggled on board with them, tucked away in their hearts, and that is the seed of violence. That seed of violence existed even in Noah, a seed waiting to grow like a weed and entangle the world in violence again.

We do not like hearing that. We would rather believe that there are good guys and bad guys, those who are prone to violence and those who are peace-loving. This story reminds us that sin -- if we can dust off that old word -- was in Noah and is in us, even in the good guys.

Before a child is baptized in our congregation, I meet with the family to talk about baptism and discuss the service. Parents often ask about the affirmation that baptism offers forgiveness of sin. One can understood this affirmation more easily in the baptism of an adult, but it seems a strange gift to offer an infant. After all, an infant has had little opportunity for sin, and it may be some time before that sin is manifest. But it’s there all right. A seed of violence is already there, as if nestled in the genes. It was in Noah -- and it is in us, as becomes clear sooner or later. That is why Reinhold Niebuhr wondered how anyone could doubt the doctrine of original sin -- it is, he said, the only Christian doctrine that is verifiable by observation.

When we approach the waters of baptism we remember Noah and the flood. Both the flood story and a baptism remind us that we stand in need of God’s cleansing. In baptism God says, "Let’s start over," but this time, let’s do it one person at a time. In baptism God confronts sin no longer by threatening death, but by offering life.

In baptism we are invited to wade into the same waters that swept away our ancestors in Noah’s time, because Jesus has gone before us and calls out, "Come on in, the water’s fine! It has been blessed by my presence. Come back to the womb so that you can be created anew. Violence may still reside in your heart, but I am there also, and I will prevail. My graceful ways are more persistent than anything you may do. And if you need a reminder of this, you do not need to look into the distant sky, because the reminder is dripping from your forehead. This is my new covenant with you. Go where you will, do whatever you will. Try as others might to threaten you, try as you might to abandon me, I will never leave your side. You are mine.

Chariot of Fire (2 Kg. 2:1-12)

Elijah, the great prophet who has traveled the length of Israel and spoken the word of the Lord directly to Israel’s king, is now about to take the longest journey of all. Somehow he knows that his time has come. His disciple Elisha knows too, but they do not speak of it. Instead, Elijah turns to Elisha and says, "Stay here; for the Lord has sent me as far as Bethel."

Elisha will hear none of it. He vows, "As the Lord lives, and as you yourself live, I will not leave you." So they go down to Bethel together, with the unspoken reality of impending death accompanying them.

When they reach Bethel, the prophets of that city can see the reality that follows Elijah like a shadow. They take Elisha aside and ask if he knows. He replies, "Yes, I know; keep silent." The reality of what lies ahead may be inescapable, but let it remain unnamed. Some realities seem too large and too powerful to be named.

As Elijah heads out for Jericho, he again asks Elisha not to go with him, and again the disciple vows that he will not leave the master. The prophets of Jericho ask, "Do you know that today the Lord will take your master away from you?" Does Elisha know? Does one know when one’s heart is breaking? If only he could forget for just a moment! "Yes, I know," he replies, "but be silent."

Perhaps Elijah wants to spare his young disciple the pain of good-bye. Or perhaps Elijah wants to spare himself. Again Elijah says, "Elisha, stay here," and again, in what has become a familiar dance between the two, Elisha vows not to leave Elijah.

When they reach the Jordan there are more prophets, but they do not take Elisha aside. Instead they keep their distance, perhaps seeing that there is nothing more to be said. When the two men reach the banks of the Jordan, Elijah takes his mantle, rolls it up like a towel and snaps it at the water. The water parts so that they can cross to the other side. There they find themselves alone, and Elijah says, "Tell me what I may do for you, before I am taken from you.

Elisha must have been tossed into a whirlwind of possible responses: "What do I need? I need to know how I can carry on. I need to know how I can be a prophet, when everything I know I learned from you and you are about to leave. I need to know how to be a leader, because all I know is how to follow. I need to know what to say when people turn to listen to the prophet of the Lord, and they mean me! I need you to stay."

What Elisha ends up saying is, "Please leave me a double dose of your spirit." Elisha assumes that he is half the man Elijah is and that he will need twice his master’s spirit just to break even.

Then Elijah says a curious thing: "If you see me as I am being taken from you, it will be granted you; if not it will not." What could he possibly mean by that? It is only later that Elisha will know.

As they continue to walk and talk together, a chariot of fire and horses of fire separates the two men. Then a whirlwind gathers up Elijah and lifts him like a child being thrown in the air by his father. Elisha, protecting his eyes from the churning sand, shouts into the wind, "Father, father! The chariots of Israel and its horseman." When he can no longer see Elijah and the wind has stilled to a whisper, Elisha tears his shirt in two in the traditional expression of grief.

Elijah had said that if Elisha saw him go he would inherit his spirit in double measure. Now it is clear why that was essential. If Elisha had not seen this, he would still be looking for Elijah, and thinking of him as living. Seeing Elijah leave was like seeing the dead body of a loved one -- it helped bring home the reality. Seeing the master go made it clear that now it was up to Elisha. The spirit he so admired in another now resided in him.

When I was in my late 20s I was installed as senior minister of First Congregational Church in Burlington, Vermont. My mother came up for the service alone because my father had died a few weeks before. He had been scheduled to preach the sermon at the service. My father had always been the towering presence in my life. Even though I chafed at the suggestion that I had gone into the ministry "to follow in my father’s footsteps," I knew that they were large footsteps and wondered if I would be able to live up to the standard of faithfulness and effectiveness he had embodied.

My mother brought me one of my father’s pulpit gowns, thinking I might want to wear it for the service. I loved my father and missed him dearly, but I hesitated to wear his robe. I was sure it wouldn’t fit or that somehow I was not yet fit to wear it. I felt like the understudy called to center stage before all the lines are learned.

Nevertheless, I tried on the gown. The sleeves were too long, as was the gown -- I had to lift up the hem to walk because otherwise I would have fallen on my face. But in other ways it felt right, as perhaps my mother had known all along. It was my way of seeing my father go and realizing that his spirit had been granted to me, perhaps even in double measure.

Azusa Street Revival

On April 9, 1906, at a prayer meeting in a modest home on Bonnie Brae Street in Los Angeles, a few men and women spoke in tongues. They had been meeting to pray for "an outpouring" of the Holy Spirit. The tongues speech convinced them that they had "broken through."

News of the event spread rapidly among blacks, Latinos and whites, the prosperous and the poor, immigrants and natives. Those who yearned for revival, as well as the curious, thronged the house. The need for space prompted a move to an abandoned Methodist church on Azusa Street. For the next two years, waves of religious enthusiasm waxed and waned at Azusa Street, attracting visitors from across the nation and missionaries from around the globe. The faithful announced that this was a reenactment of the New Testament Day of Pentecost: "All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages as the Spirit gave them ability" (Acts 2:4). God was restoring New Testament experiences of the Holy Spirit -- or, as devotees of the movement put it, restoring the apostolic faith.

At Azusa Street, one could see and hear the "utterance gifts" listed in 1 Corinthians 12:8-10. Seekers spent hours praying to be baptized with the Holy Spirit, an experience they expected would be attested by speaking in tongues. People interpreted tongues and prophesied -- phenomena with which few Christians had any direct experience. The sick came for healing.

Why were such things happening on an out-of-the-way city street? The faithful had a simple answer: the end of the world loomed, and God was sending the Holy Spirit to equip his chosen people for one last burst of evangelism before it was too late. The baptism with the Holy Spirit was an end-times "enduement with power for service" that went hand in hand with personal holiness. The visible gifts of the Holy Spirit testified to the Spirit’s immediate presence in and among believers.

A century later, Pentecostal denominations boast over 10 million members in the U.S. If one adds those in other churches who embrace Pentecostal-like beliefs and practices, the number more than doubles. Estimates in 2005 of the worldwide number of Pentecostals suggest that there are over 580 million adherents, making Pentecostals the second largest group of Christians in the world, trailing only Roman Catholics. Even those who challenge these numbers agree that by any measure Pentecostal Christianity has experienced dramatic growth. Directly and indirectly, the Azusa Street revival influenced this expansion.

Azusa Street stands at the core of the Pentecostal myth of origins. In recent years scholars have stressed that global Pentecostalism has multiple origins, and that the Azusa Street revival was one of several impulses that birthed a distinctly Pentecostal form of Christianity. In some places the Welsh Revival of 1904-1905 played the role that Azusa Street filled in North America. The Korean revival of 1907, the Indian revivals reaching back into the 19th century and some indigenous African movements are watersheds in non-Western Pentecostal narratives. Yet, for a variety of reasons, Azusa Street has gained the most visibility, especially in Western renderings of Pentecostal history. And perhaps justifiably so: its immediate global impact, its widely circulated publications, and its networking role kept people aware of its message. Even if Azusa Street was not the only source of the global Pentecostal impulse. it had a vital role in shaping the contours of worldwide Pentecostalism.

What happened at Azusa Street? At the center of this "new thing" stood an African-American preacher named William Seymour. The son of slaves, Seymour had traveled to Los Angeles from Texas to share what he had learned from a self-made preacher named Charles Fox Parham.

During the 1890s, Parham had heard much talk about the baptism with the Holy Spirit, but he observed a lack of consensus on the evidence for this baptism. In 1901, Parham began to preach that the "Bible evidence" of the baptism with the Holy Spirit was speaking in tongues. He called his message the Apostolic Faith. In 1903, thanks to a healing and local revival in eastern Kansas, Parharm’s Apostolic Faith began attracting followers. By 1905 his work had reached the Houston area, where he met Seymour. Parham encouraged Seymour to accept an invitation to preach in Los Angeles.

The Azusa Street mission, then, had direct antecedents in Parham’s modest midwestern efforts. The core of Parham’s message prospered briefly in Seymour’s hands. For a few years, the Azusa Street mission became the best-known hub of a movement framed by premillennialist views, influenced by a Wesleyan fervor for holiness and committed to the practice of the spiritual gifts enumerated in 1 Corinthians 12. For a time at least, whites, blacks, Latinos and Native Americans mingled at the mission, though interracial acceptance was at best imperfect and soon broken.

In the fall of 1906, Seymour and an associate, a white woman named Clara Lum, began chronicling the revival in a periodical called Apostolic Faith. It quickly became evident that the Azusa Street revival resonated with widely scattered people in part because it seemed hauntingly familiar. Azusa Street gave them context for their own religious experiences and networked them with those who shared their radical evangelical instincts.

In time new denominations influenced by Azusa Street blended the distinctive Apostolic Faith focus on the experience of the Holy Spirit with traditional evangelical tenets. Before World War I, the Church of God in Christ, the Assemblies of God, the Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee), the Pentecostal Holiness Church and a host of smaller associations -- English-speaking and immigrant -- had woven the message associated with Azusa Street into a fabric of belief and practice. In the 1920s, Aimee Semple McPherson’s new International Church of the Foursquare Gospel was poised to reinvigorate Los Angeles Pentecostalisin. By then, internal disunity had prompted the formation of a cluster of Pentecostal denominations (Anglo, African American and Latino) that denied the Trinity -- for example, the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World, the forerunner of the United Pentecostal Church, and many Apostolic movements -- while sharing the Apostolic Faith heritage. A host of more recent independent associations, charismatic fellowships and nondenominational megachurches also draw inspiration from versions of the Azusa Street narrative.

The Azusa Street revival had global reach through Apostolic Faith, the popular religious press, missionary correspondence and personal ambassadors who, emboldened by their religious experiences, traveled the globe to announce firsthand the revival’s urgent message of spiritual empowerment in the last days. In time, career missionaries supported by Pentecostal denominations planted the revival’s message in remote places around the globe.

The centrality of Azusa Street in the story of Pentecostalism is due in large part to the work of the revivals tireless promoter Frank Bartleman. A restless maverick driven from place to place by his determination to be part of whatever God was doing in the world, Bartleman singlehandedly turned the Azusa Street revival into a literary event of global magnitude by chronicling his impressions and assigning them meaning in a widely circulated book, How Pentecost Came to Los Angeles. In this 1925 publication, Bartleman made a case for the centrality of "old Azusa" for Pentecostal identity: "Wales was but intended as the cradle for this worldwide restoration of the power of God. India but the Nazareth where he was ‘brought up."’ What really mattered was Azusa Street. American Pentecostals and many scholars have since often been content to take his word for it, glimpsing Azusa Street through Bartleman’s eyes instead of rigorously examining the revival’s extent and limits.

Azusa Street has had a profound place in collective Pentecostal memory. Its imaginative power shapes not only narrative but also practice and makes the historiography of Pentecostalism surprisingly contentious because adherents generally embrace a particular version of the revival’s story and often engage parts of its legacy rather the whole. The Apostolic Faith Mission no longer stands on Azusa Street, but a century after the mission opened its doors (and in some ways now more than ever) the Azusa Street revival in one way or another frames the identities of millions of Pentecostal Christians.