According to Cox, the wild, untrammeled worship Ferree devotes himself
to, which has always distinguished the tradition, is quietly falling out of
favor as mainline Pentecostal and charismatic churches attempt to enlarge
their demographic. Speaking in tongues, once a requisite for salvation in
many Pentecostal churches, is an increasingly rare practice among celebrity
clergy. A recent memo from Ted Haggard, president of the National
Association of Evangelicals and pastor of the 11,000-member charismatic New
Life Church in Colorado Springs, cautioned his flock against untelegenic
behavior such as "jumping and dancing," "excessive emotionalism" or anything
that nonbelievers might construe as "spooky or weird."
In Pentecostalism's emerging markets -- sub-Saharan Africa, South America,
China -- the movement still spreads through grass-roots networks, and
unknown circuit preachers still command the sorts of audiences they did in
Pentecostalism's nascent years in America. Ferree, who has twice preached in
Nigeria, says that in Africa he drew crowds of 1,200, the largest of his
career. "In three nights, 700 people got saved," Ferree says. "It was like
something out of the 1950s."
The term "pentecostal" refers to a passage in Acts 2:1 in which
Christ's apostles gathered on the day of Pentecost (the 50th day after Passover,
"pentecost" means "50th" in Greek) and were filled with the Holy Spirit and
began to speak in tongues, a practice that the modern-day faithful believe to be
a direct communion with God. The language of tongues manifests as a barrage of
asyntactic syllables, which believers feel to be the language of the divine.
"It's the language of angels," says Ferree. "What language do you think an angel
speaks, Japanese?"
When Ferree speaks in tongues, he says, he is not slipping from
ordinary consciousness, nor is he expressing a formulated sentiment. "You feel a
welling up of so much love for God that when you open your mouth, that's what
comes out. It's sort of like how somebody might feel excited at a football game
and have to jump up and holler."
Most trace the birth of Pentecostalism to a Kansas Methodist
minister named Charles Parham, who, on January 1, 1901, saw one of his Bible
school students speaking in tongues, a practice modern Christians then
considered lost to biblical antiquity. The woman did not let up for three days,
and afterward, Parham built a new doctrine based on the notion that speaking in
tongues signified a new baptism of the Holy Spirit. But the movement didn't
catch fire until six years later, at a revival held by a black preacher named
William Seymour in a deserted warehouse on Azusa Street in Los Angeles. Blacks,
whites, Asians and Mexicans flocked to Seymour's meetings, where they spoke in
tongues, quaked and shook on the sawdust floor, seeking what they believed to be
a personal touch from God. As the movement spread from Los Angeles, mainstream
churches viewed the emerging faith with scorn. Mainline ecclesiastical
authorities dismissed Pentecostalists as lunatics, drunks, Christ-addled hicks
and, as one theologian of the day put it, "the last vomit of Satan."
But Pentecostal evangelists were undeterred. They roved the country,
spreading the new gospel, which found particularly fertile soil for its message
in the American South. In the 1940s and '50s, what Ferree and his colleagues
call "the great move of God" took hold. Pentecostal faith healers such as
William Branham, Jack Coe, A.A. Allen and Oral Roberts were drawing audiences of
thousands to their revival tents, claiming to have performed healing feats --
allegedly curing polio victims, restoring sight to the blind and hearing to the
deaf -- that their followers accepted as bona fide miracles. In the eyes of the
less credulous though, Pentecostalists' self-professed abilities to wield
heavenly powers over health and illness continue to taint Pentecostalism with an
air of cynical charlatanism. In 1987, Oral Roberts tested the faith of even his
own congregants when he prophesied that God would kill him unless he raised $8
million. In 1999, evangelist Benny Hinn suggested that people might resurrect
dead loved ones by basking their corpses in the life-giving glow of televisions
tuned to the Trinity Broadcasting Network.
(In recent years, scholars, medical researchers and dabblers in the
pseudo-sciences have conducted scores of trials, attempting to determine the
practical effectiveness of faith healing and intercessory prayer. The few
experiments claiming positive results have generally been proven
methodologically shoddy. More rigorous trials, such as a study this year at Duke
University, showed that prayer rendered no benefits to patients undergoing
cardiac procedures.) In the 1960s, Pentecostal tent evangelists began to see
their audiences winnowed, as newly constructed civic centers and hotel
convention centers offered more comfortable revival venues, and as evangelists
reached larger crowds and larger tracts of pocketbooks through their newfound
telepulpits.
While the movement draws devotees across class strata, according to
Vinson Synan, Pentecostal scholar and dean of the divinity school at Regent
University in Virginia Beach, Pentecostalism finds its bedrock following among
"the poorest people on Earth."
"It began as a movement of the common people," Synan says. "It
reached out to people on an emotional level rather than an intellectual one, and
offered a kind of religious experience anyone could respond to, which made it
accessible to masses of people on an enormous magnitude."
For all the hubbub about the ascendant political might of
evangelical Christians, and the burgeoning coffers and membership rolls of
Pentecostal megachurches, tent revivalists such as Mike Ferree -- still clinging
to a tradition from a half-century ago -- are proud to remain outsiders in a
faith that first took root in America's religious counterculture. "We're on the
backside of the desert," Ferree says. "Taking care of the inheritance."
When Ferree has preached his last revival for the week, he heads to
his home in Cleveland, Tenn., which lies 20 miles north of Chattanooga in the
foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. Cleveland is home to a number of
national Pentecostal denominations, such as the Church of God of Prophecy, which
has 777,000 members worldwide, and the Church of God, Cleveland, which, with
about 7 million members, is one of the largest Pentecostal organizations in the
world.
But Ferree has few dealings with these larger seats of Pentecostal
influence. He moved to Cleveland to be nearer to his mentor, H. Richard Hall,
who traveled the roads preaching to crowds not much larger than those Ferree
draws now. Though Ferree says Hall never earned a salary above $25,000, he was a
man of legendary thrift, and he left an endowment of nearly $10 million to the
United Christian Church and Ministerial Association, which he'd founded in 1956.
After Hall died in 2002, Ferree accepted an appointment as UCMA's president.
When he was hired, Ferree says, he was offered a salary of $40,000. "I told
them, 'That's too much. I'll take $1,500 a month.' They said, 'You gotta have
$2,000.' I said, 'Open your mouth again, and I'll do it for 12.'"
