People sway and tap their feet to the rhythm of his words. A tiny,
superannuated woman dances in the aisles. A heavyset woman in an
electric-blue blouse interrupts Ferree's sermon with a long, sonorous
declamation in tongues. Ferree falls silent to let her speak. "God is in
this room," he says. "Speak to us, oh Lord."Ferree
himself was not always such an eager vessel for the Holy Spirit. He usually
discloses, as part of his sermonic repertoire, that he was a drug user and
pusher in his twenties, and was twice shot in drug deals: "One was
self-inflicted, I was high on heroin. I had a loaded .38 in my pocket, and I
accidentally shot myself in the knee." During another botched transaction in
San Antonio, Ferree was buying drugs from a dealer who insisted on taking
Ferree's money up front before going to get the drugs. When Ferree
protested, he says, the man offered to leave his associate in the car as
collateral and handed Ferree a gun. "He said, 'If I don't come back, shoot
my friend.' I said, 'Okay, that'll work.'"
The dealer vanished with the money, leaving Ferree, his friends, and
their hostage in an awkward spot. Soon after, Ferree says, the hostage pulled
out his own pistol and "went to shooting" in the moving car. A bullet penetrated
Ferree's back, collapsed his lung and lodged against his ribs, where it lies
today. But Ferree managed to put a loaded pistol to the head of the man who'd
shot him. "I cocked the hammer, and a voice which I now believe was the voice of
Jesus said, 'Don't kill the guy,' so I ended up letting him live." For months
after, Ferree says, the voice continually revisited him, ultimately compelling
him out of addiction and into a 30-year career as a man of God.
At Jesus Way Temple, Ferree's sermon is winding down. "If you need
prayer," he says, his forehead glistening, "come up here and let us lay hands on
you."
The congregants come forward, seeking prayer for, among other
things, back trouble, ill will toward others and poor schoolwork. When the altar
call subsides, the congregants resume their seats, wearing expressions of
exhaustion and relief, like people deplaning after a crash landing.
Ferree looks drained, himself. "Thank you, Lord, for stopping by
this little church in Washington, D.C.," he says, his eyes shut tightly. "Thank
you, Lord."
Then he adds: "Please friends, help me with an offering. This is how
I pay my bills; this is how I stay on the field, serving the Lord."
People come forward with ones, fives and tens, but mostly ones. He
accepts the modest collection and flashes his mammoth smile. Tomorrow he'll be
on the road again, preaching at a church in Aberdeen, Md. "Come on by, friends,
and wear your shouting shoes."
To an outsider, people who come to Mike Ferree's meetings might look
like esoteric throwbacks to an antique, backwater faith; in fact, they're
members of a new global religious vanguard. With more than 530 million followers
across the globe (and 20 million in the United States alone), Pentecostalism and
its interdenominational offshoot, the charismatic movement, have seen the most
explosive growth of any Christian tradition in the world in the last 100 years.
One-quarter of all Christians worldwide reportedly attend Pentecostal or
charismatic churches, with the strongest growth in South America and elsewhere
in the Third World.
Pentecostal churches have spread in China, Japan and Korea, where
pastor David Yonggi Cho's Yoido Full Gospel Church (Seoul) lists a membership of
more than 700,000, which would make it the largest church in the world. Though
the tradition is barely a century old, Pentecostalism is far and away the most
significant religious movement to emerge from the United States.
Yet American Pentecostalism is beginning to re-semble less and less
the rough-hewn folk movement that helped propel it to global prominence. A
tradition that was born in warehouses, home meetings and open-air revivals
throughout the rural South, Pentecostalism now boasts some of the largest and
wealthiest churches in America. The character of the faith appears to be
shifting, too. Many of the movement's highest-profile personalities --
megachurch pastors such as Joyce Meyer, T.D. Jakes, Creflo Dollar and Joel
Osteen -- enjoy parallel careers as best-selling authors of Biblically grounded
self-help books and personal prosperity literature (sample title from Creflo
Dollar: No More Debt!: God's Strategy for Debt Cancellation).
"The question is, will success spoil Pentecostalism," says Harvey
Cox, professor of divinity at Harvard University and author of numerous books on
the Pentecostal and charismatic movements. "In this country at least, [the
movement's] turned quite affluent and glitzy. One wonders what's going to happen
to the ministry that was so characteristic of the movement?"
