by Doug Merlino
“Do you feel God’s presence?” he asks.
A burst of organ. The drummer brushes his crash cymbal.
“Can you feel God’s presence?”
The music begins to pick up again.
People sway from side to side, their hands held up in the air.
“Thank you Jesus, thank you Jesus, thank you Jesus,” a woman chants.
A large man in a blue suit begins dancing, drops to the ground, shakes for a moment, and then springs up with his hands in the air.
A young woman falls to her knees, crying, and presses her forehead to the floor. A female usher rushes over and holds a sheet around her for privacy.
Townsend begins to preach. “I remember when you were hurting, when you were struggling, when your homes were torn apart. Come on, people! You still have an enemy! We still need God, more than we did before. The world is coming to an end. Prophesies are being fulfilled. The only thing that’s going to help you today is this altar,” he says, striking the pulpit with the palm of his hand. “Do you know who’s going to survive the terrorist attacks? It’s going to be the black people. We were born where they put us, down at the bottom. We’re used to sifting rat droppings out of our food.”
As Townsend speaks, Damian crosses his arms and cradles his chin in his right hand, a look of deep concentration on his face. The service ebbs and flows for three and a half hours, hitting emotional peaks, settling down, and then rising back up. Finally Townsend calls forward everyone who feels down, sick, weary, tired, ready for a change. The organ hums. Young and old trickle from the pews until there are ten people in front of the altar, kneeling, heads down, tears flowing as Townsend lays his hands on each one and leads the congregation in prayer that God will give them the strength to find a new path.
The roots of Damian’s strand of Christianity go back just one century, but in those hundred years, the Pentecostal faith has grown at a staggering speed. The most influential early proponent of the religion, William Joseph Seymour, was born in 1870 in Centreville, Louisiana, the son of former slaves. In his twenties, Seymour lived in Indianapolis, where he worked as a waiter, moving later to Cincinnati. During that time, he was “saved” by a revival group that believed Christ was soon to return to Earth and that believers should abandon their old churches to form a new, racially inclusive one to be ready for God’s kingdom.
Seymour moved on to Houston, where, during a service in a black church, he saw something that amazed him: a woman entered a trance and began speaking in phrases he could not understand. Seymour was touched by what he thought was a depth of spiritual feeling he could not attain. He had never seen anyone speak in tongues before, but he knew it to be a sign of the Apocalypse.
The phenomenon appears in the Bible in Acts, book 2, which tells of Christians gathering to celebrate the Pentecost, fifty days after Passover. Suddenly, a sound “like a mighty wind” comes from heaven, and each feels the Holy Spirit rush in. They begin to speak with “tongues as of fire.” Though they are from different nations, they suddenly understand each other, as if the curse of Babel has been lifted. When people passing by think they’re drunk, the Apostle Peter stands and announces that it’s the fulfillment of prophesy. The Holy Spirit is pouring out into the world, heralding the coming of the Last Days and the return of Christ.
Almost two thousand years later, in Houston, Seymour questioned the woman about her gift. She introduced him to her former employer, Charles Fox Parham, a white preacher who ran a Bible school. Seymour asked to study in the school, but Parham, being a Ku Klux Klan sympathizer, wouldn’t let him in. The two agreed that Seymour could sit outside by an open window and listen.
While Seymour prayed to be granted the gift of tongues, he also preached to black congregations in Houston. A woman visiting the city was taken by his sermonizing and invited him to preach at her church in Los Angeles. Seymour borrowed the train fare from Parham and set off, arriving on the West Coast in 1906. When he got there, he found that the congregation was turned off by his message, so he began to preach in living rooms. His first congregants, all black, were domestic servants and laundry women.
Los Angeles was fertile ground for a new religious movement. The city—hyped by boosters and developers hoping to make a buck by luring more people west—was promoted as a kind of utopia, a land of milk and honey offering opportunity and the chance of riches. In a strange twist, the city, settled by blacks, Indians, and Spanish, was sold as a place of racial purity, where Anglo-Saxons could escape the immigrant hordes of the East Coast. In reality, Los Angeles was then—as it is now—a diverse place, with large racial and class divides. Many people on the bottom were primed for a new religious message. As word of Seymour’s powerful preaching spread, pilgrims, black and white, sought him out. On April 9, 1906, a number of congregants were stricken and began speaking in tongues. The crowds grew, and the congregation rented a vacant building at 312 Azusa Street—which had last been used as a stable—and began a movement that quickly radiated out.
The Azusa Street Revival ran for five years, with thousands making the pilgrimage from across the nation. Services were held three times a day, with up to eight hundred people inside and several hundred more overflowing outside. Seymour offered a way to directly encounter God without the interference of church dogma. Mixed in with apocalyptic feelings—an earthquake leveled San Francisco a few days after the revival began—and entrenched social inequality, the movement attracted mostly working-class and poor people of all races. “The baptism of the spirit did not just change their religious affiliation or their way of worship,” writes religion professor Harvey Cox in his history of the Pentecostal movement, Fire from Heaven. “It changed everything. They literally saw the world in a whole new light.” Pentecostalism was an equalizer, a religion not dependent on textual interpretations or centuries of doctrine. Anyone—rich or poor, black or white, educated or not—could experience the gift of tongues and a connection with God. All you needed was a Bible and belief. “The New Jerusalem was coming,” writes Cox. “Now the rich and the proud would get their just deserts. The destitute, the overlooked, and the forgotten would come into their own. Even more central for Seymour, in a segregated America, God was now assembling a new and racially inclusive people to glorify his name and to save a Jim Crow nation lost in sin.”
Seymour saw the interracial quality of the Pentecostal movement as a sign that it represented a coming together of tribes as described in the Bible. But as revivals sprouted around the country, the movement splintered. One of the main drivers was racial, as white preachers broke away to form their own congregations. But Pentecostalism was well on its way to becoming the fastest-growing religious movement of the past century; there are now an estimated 400 million Pentecostals around the world, and the religion has been particularly embraced in poor countries. In June 1907, Charles Harrison Mason, a black southerner, visited Azusa Street. When he returned to Jackson, Mississippi, he began to preach the Pentecostal faith. His church, the Church of God in Christ, now headquartered in Memphis, is the country’s biggest predominantly black Pentecostal church, with more than five million members in congregations spread from Alaska to West Africa. Damian’s is one of them.
“Most of the individuals in our church, almost everybody in our church, came to me with nothing. Zero. From the streets. Prostitutes, homosexuals, lesbians, thieves, murderers—now, they all did their time!—but they all came to me that way,” Sam Townsend tells me early on a Sunday morning before services. “And all of them, probably eighty-five percent of them, have good jobs now. Homes. Families. They didn’t have to resort back to street life, drug-selling, those things, to get ahead.”
We meet in his office. Townsend sits behind his large desk in a padded leather chair, in front of a bookcase built into the wall. With his tailored black suit and easy smile, he is a charismatic man—you could imagine him preaching on one of the religious stations on cable on a Friday night—and he is quick to make a personal connection. He pepp
ers the several conversations we have with references to my profession and the old basketball team. His speech is sprinkled with both biblical references and jokes.
Born in 1948, Townsend grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where his dad worked for General Motors, and came to Seattle after a stint in the army brought him to Fort Lewis, near Tacoma. After his discharge, he joined the Seattle Police Department. “I was about twenty years old when I came on the police department,” he says, “straight out of the military and into Seattle and involved in all kinds of behavior—drugs, you name it, I lived the life.” In 1973, Townsend wandered into a Central Area Pentecostal church, where he knelt at the altar and was saved. In 1980 he founded his church in the basement rec room of a Central Area rental house with a $1,000 loan from his father. The congregation grew from its original six members and, in the late 1980s, Townsend bought the current location (Damian’s mom, Helen, joined the congregation at that time). Besides its religious services, the church runs a daycare center and an adoption agency for African-American children.
Money is always tight. The church is funded by tithes collected from the congregation of three hundred, at least those members who can afford to pay. Townsend receives no salary. His wife has taken a part-time job with H&R Block to help make ends meet. Though Townsend wears sharp suits that look quite expensive to my eye, he tells me he shops at secondhand stores. The secret, he says, is to have a good tailor. He pulls up the sleeve of his suit to show me a monogram on his white dress shirt. “This shirt looks pretty good,” he says, “but it’s not my initials on the bottom of it. I don’t know who that guy is!”
“Nothing’s in my name,” Townsend says when I ask who owns the church. “Everything belongs to the parishioners. If I die today, this belongs to the people. It doesn’t go to my wife, my kids, or anybody. Again, you’re looking at a guy who came off the street, a guy who preaches the basic tenets of the Bible—nothing coming out of the sky, I don’t see angels, I don’t see nobody—but I read, and I follow the directions of the Scripture.”
Townsend often preaches about the divide between the spiritual and secular worlds. Life here on Earth is fleeting, he says, but eternity lasts forever, so you should keep that primary in your mind. Still, he tells his congregation, you’ve got to get by while you’re here. For many of the church’s members, Townsend acts as a middleman between them and Seattle’s mainstream institutions, helping them to navigate banks, social service agencies, landlords, and prospective employers. Sometimes he also jibes the congregation for what he sees as its desires to partake in the upper-middle-class good life. At one service I attend, he brings up the automated checkout registers that some local supermarkets have installed. A lot of people just view them as signs of technological progress and speed, he says, but he looks at them and sees members of the church losing their jobs.
Townsend rejects the “prosperity gospel,” an idea popular in many churches both black and white, which holds that living a holy life will lead to material rewards. “It’s not a biblical teaching. It would be unfair for us to take a Scripture and to say, ‘God wants us to prosper and be in health even as our soul prospers,’ and then you see the difference in economic levels of people in the church,” he says. “We’re not coming to God to get anything other than some stability in our life. And we say that if we get some stability in our life, then we can accomplish things, then we can go to college, then we can do whatever, but it’s not necessarily a divine principle that if you come to God you’re going to get off welfare, if you come to God you’re going to get a new car, you’re going to get big money, something’s going to fall out of the sky.”
Instead of thinking about getting rich, Townsend says, you’ve just got to live your life and not let yourself get too upset or blown off course when things are tough. You’ve got to keep your head, which means surviving within the dominant culture. “We teach that doors can be open for us that no man can shut. So I don’t go into the workplace as an African American feeling that someone is going to discriminate against me, even though it does happen. But there’s a power greater than those on Earth that’s going to open doors greater than no man can shut, so then when I’m presenting myself, or when the young African-American men here present themselves to white America, so to speak, it’s not with a hostile attitude,” he says. “It’s with a spirit of expectation, that this is my job, I’m gonna get it, and if I get the job, I’m gonna do a good job, because what I’m doing is under God and that is unto man, and I don’t feel oppressed and I don’t feel angry about what happened four hundred years ago, I’m a new creature, all men are brothers, and so let’s go for it.”
When someone comes into the church, no matter what their situation, Townsend tries to help. If a new arrival needs a place to stay, a member of the congregation will put him up. If he’s broke, people will buy him food. If he just got an apartment but has no furniture, people will donate to him. When the person is ready, Townsend has a variety of contacts he can call to set people up with jobs. The main thing, he says, is to provide an example, give people hope, and show them that there is a way to leave behind some of the turmoil in their lives. “I believe the black man has been suffering for four hundred years, and if it takes God another four hundred years for our deliverance, so be it,” he says. “But I’m not going to take matters into my own hands and then have innocent, well-intentioned African Americans die at the hands of the oppressor just because I’m anxious about getting free. I don’t think that’s necessary anymore. I don’t think it’s necessary for dogs to bite us and hoses to be sprayed on our people anymore, because you’re dealing with a different generation.
“These young men that we’re talking about now—and I know you know because it’s your generation—they’re hostile brothers, man. You thought my generation, in the 1960s and 1970s, was hostile, no, no, we’d march and then we’d run, but these guys will die. So the last thing they need is a hostile leader. They need a passive leader, to say, ‘No, brother, calm down, I know what you want, let me show you how to get it.’
“So when the little hustlers come into church, they’ve got money. First of all, I don’t allow them to give me anything—Brother Damian will bear witness—I don’t allow them to give me anything like the Mafia did the Catholic Church. But what I do is I sit them down and help them put together a business plan. ‘OK, you’re through with the game, you want to get your life together, you need to get some education, even if it’s no more than a GED. Then what kind of skills do you have?’ ‘Well, I wash cars.’ ‘Then let’s do a detail shop. Let’s put together a business plan and do something constructive.’ If you can show this kid—especially if he wants out, some of them don’t want out, I’m only dealing with those that want out—if you can show this guy where he can make an honest buck and be respected by the rest of the folk in society, he’ll do it. He’ll do it. But you’ve got to have some examples. You’ve got to have a Sam Townsend. You’ve got to have a Damian.”
At twenty-one, Damian had been kicked off the Seattle University basketball team and was on the verge of completely flunking out. He was clubbing, drinking, smoking weed, and generally unhappy. In his turmoil, he checked out the Nation of Islam but was turned off by the “black man/white man stuff.” He went to the library and read about different religions—Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, Christianity. One night, when he was hanging out smoking pot with a friend, he kept thinking that his life was headed for a dead end. Not long after, he was at home at his mom’s, on the couch. He started to think about God and said to himself, Lord Jesus, come into my heart, save me. I believe that you died on the cross, I believe you rose from the dead.
The transformation was instantaneous. “I just became a new person immediately, like stepping out of this glass and looking inside and seeing life totally different,” Damian says. “I was no longer dead.” His desires—to drink and smoke, to watch rap videos, to use profanity—were gone. His craving for things such as Air Jordans vanished. He distanced hims
elf from his old friends, got his grades up enough to stay in college, and began a new life. “It’s like this, Doug,” he tells me. “Living in the same city, you still see the same people. But I’m a new person. All they’re seeing is what they’re doing. I’m seeing in a totally different way.”
It would be impossible to understate how much getting saved changed Damian; his faith and the church became the center of his life. Damian met his wife, Michelle, there shortly after his conversion. Besides Sunday services and Bible study on Tuesday and Friday nights, Damian mentors other members and collects tithes. One Saturday a month, he drives down to Tacoma to the Church of God in Christ’s Washington headquarters—a cavernous building in a strip mall—where the leaders of the state’s nearly eighty congregations meet.
The church also allowed him to separate himself from the street economy in which so many of friends had gotten caught up. “It’s just choices you make,” Damian says frequently, expressing his belief that everyone has control over his own actions, no matter how much external pressure there is. Obstacles such as racism, while they exist, are not an excuse, Damian insists. One day, when we are driving near his house in the South End, a black man wearing baggy jeans and a huge white T-shirt crosses the road in front of Damian’s car. The man, who looks to be in his early twenties, glares at us. “He’s blaming the white man for all his problems. That’s what they do,” Damian remarks, surprising me with the level of scorn I hear in his voice.
“You can be free in the world but bound in your mind and the things that you do,” he says. “That’s where a lot of my friends—James [Credit] and all—they were bound, and it ended up sucking them to the end. They weren’t free from those things, and I’m free now, to the point where I don’t have to be bound to those things that held me captive.