Straight to Jesus - Tanya Erzen

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at Open Door are informal and spontaneous. At one of my first visits, Pastor Mike's son, who is the unofficial leader of the Open Door band, played soft Christian rock songs on guitar accompanied by a keyboardist, two female singers, and a drummer. Their band toured Ireland and parts of Europe later that summer as part of a series of Christian youth events. A disco ball that belonged to the community center revolved overhead, refracting the light from outside. The lyrics to “Shout to the Lord” were projected on a screen above us, and the congregation sang the chorus over and over:

      Shout to the Lord, all the earth,

      let us sing

      power and majesty, praise to the king;

      mountains bow down and the seas will roar

      at the sound of your name.

      I sing for joy at the work of your hands,

      forever I'll love you, forever I'll stand,

      nothing compares to the promise I have in you.

      The singing was heartfelt and expressive. Brian closed his eyes and extended his palms upward. Curtis shook from side to side as if he were at a concert and frequently lifted his hands in a posture of surrender. This part of the service lasted for half an hour. The singing reached a crescendo, but the band continued, and the congregation repeated the chorus one more time. The program bulletin called it praise and worship, and the intensity of singing was meant to express a deep love for God. Brian and Curtis's participation in worship was much more bodily than cognitive. Afterward, when I asked why Pastor Mike had used a particular word during his sermon, Curtis could not recall what I was talking about. “I loved the worship service,” he replied, humming “Shout to the Lord.”

      With the music playing gently in the background, Pastor Mike had preached a short sermon based around Romans. His sermons tended to be Bible-centered instead of topical. Members of New Hope are encouraged to interpret scripture for themselves and have direct interactions with God. Pastor Mike was an understated and folksy minister rather than a fire-and-brimstone preacher or flashy televangelist. He frequently spoke about the apocalypse and his belief in the Second Coming of Jesus, a belief that some evangelical churches espouse to varying degrees.6 “The Bible is fuzzy on the end times issue. There will be an ending. I tell people to pick your poison and to be ready,” he later explained. The official church doctrine listed at the Open Door Web site states, “We believe the age will end with the return of Jesus Christ to set up His kingdom.” Pastor Mike and Frank see evangelizing and sharing their beliefs with a wider culture as a necessity. They often speak of their “callings” to minister to those struggling with homosexuality.

      At the end of the service at Open Door, with Pastor Mike's encouragement, several people came to the front of the room for healing prayer. Brian strode forward and leaned over a new member of the program, laying his hand on his shoulder, praying fervently but softly. Ray, in his late forties, wearing jeans and a rumpled shirt, knelt before him with his eyes squeezed shut, also praying. Brian intended his laying on of hands to be caring but casual, so that anyone would feel empowered to step forward to receive healing. Open Door teaches that everyone should receive the baptism of the Holy Spirit. “We believe in the power of the Holy Spirit, his dwelling presence in every believer, and the gifts that he imparts,” Pastor Riley explained. “People teach that you're automatically filled with the spirit when you're born again and to a certain degree I believe that your spirit is quickened,” said Hank. One of the signs that a person has accepted the Holy Spirit is that he or she receives a prayer language or the ability to pray in tongues. Connected with this ability is a feeling that one has what Hank calls “a prophetic gift of healing.…I really believe that the mainstream church is lacking in a dynamic manifestation of the spirit. It's more a religion, [a] head thing, and that has never done anything for me whatsoever. I think everybody should be filled with the spirit.” Hank's everyday life is suffused with this practice. Frequently, as he went about his other tasks as the resident New Hope handyman, he would start praying loudly or singing a particularly religious Johnny Cash song, like “Will You Meet Me in Heaven Someday?” He believed that these manifestations of his spirit-filled nature were simply spontaneous eruptions beyond his control, which was further proof to him of the way the spirit moved in his everyday life.

      Many men eagerly anticipated the healing portion of the service at Open Door, but overall a communal aspect of worship infused the entire church experience. Pastor Mike asked us to hug and talk to our neighbors, to hold hands, and there was a lot of bumping into each other as everyone swayed to the music. When he noticed my hesitation and stiffness, Curtis grabbed my sweaty palms during praise and worship, forcing me briefly to move along with him. Open Door's mode of worship reintegrates bodily experience into religious life. Being there seemed to allay the men's deeply felt anxieties about their sexuality, and many spoke of feeling ecstatic joy and profound peace after services. It made sense that in a program where physical and sexual contact is strictly regulated, the euphoric and physically intimate experience of worship could serve as a release or safety valve for frustration and loneliness. The repression of all forms of sexuality at New Hope could manifest in the emotionalism of the religious service at Open Door. The lyrics to the last song, projected on the screen from a transparency, read, “Bless our lives, Holy Spirit,/Holy Spirit, fill our lives with peace.”

      After the services and during the week, men in the program attended Bible studies, men's meetings, and other special-interest groups under the auspices of Open Door. Robert Wuthnow points out that after the 1960s, Christians demonstrated their faith in small, politically oriented groups that transcended denominational and theological affiliation.7 Miller writes that, “New paradigm churches tend to be filled with programs that deal with the specific needs of those attending them. It is not surprising, then that small group meetings in homes are at the core or all these movements.”8 Open Door and New Hope are descended from this form of special-interest Christianity, except that they focus solely on issues of homosexuality, which has alienated them from other post–denominational churches. Contrary to the perception that conservative Christian theology and practice are rooted in exclusion, New Hope offers inclusion for those who have been shunned or alienated by both mainstream and conservative churches as long as they acquiesce to the process of change. One man praised Pastor Mike: “When he's really talking about things that are more pointed toward people's lives, he's amazingly open, amazingly supportive. I didn't hear any of the stuff about you're scum, you're going to hell. I was really surprised how supportive he was.” In a conservative Christian religious landscape in which homophobia is prevalent, Open Door provides an unlikely haven.

      BIBLE BELIEVERS

      The idea of a church organized around transforming sexuality has not generally been the norm in most fundamentalist or evangelical religious traditions, which either rarely mention homosexuality or deem it a sin. New Hope and Open Door are part of a wider evangelical tradition, which is a broad category that encompasses fundamentalism and a range of communities, congregations, and movements associated with modern Protestantism. Evangelicalism emerged in the early eighteenth century as a form of “Jesus-friendly Christianity” with what historian Stephen Prothero calls a “unique combination of enthusiasm and egalitarianism, revivalism and republicanism, biblicism and common sense.”9 The revivals of the Second Great Awakening in the 1830s and 1840s provided a new set of religious ideas within Protestant Christianity. In contrast to the Calvinist doctrine that emphasized a fallen humanity and sovereign God, revivalists claimed that sinners could choose salvation and their own spiritual destinies. The evangelical notion of self-determination and agency went hand in hand with individualistic impulses in American society. Evangelicalism's main tenets—that each person can be transformed through conversion, that people have free moral agency, and that inequality is not divinely mandated—altered the ways marginal people in the United States viewed themselves and their social circumstances during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Conversions and revivals had an impact outside of religious life and ultimately represented new forms of democratization in which religious outsiders like women, African Americans, and working people achieved greater access to the public realm and forms of social power. They used the revivals to register discontent with wider economic and social changes brought on by the market revolution.10 For decades after the Second Great

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