The Frank Peretti Collection

by Frank E. Peretti

  He was either an associate pastor or an usher. He had that man-in-charge look about him. “Good morning,” he said.

  “Good afternoon,” I said, aware of the time. I shook his hand and introduced us.

  “Miles Newberry,” he said. “Associate pastor.”

  “We just moved down from Seattle. I’m going to UCLA, working on my teaching degree, and Marian’s working for . . .” I went on. I thought it would be okay to be conversational.

  An usher came up. “Miles, did you check with Ron about the alternate scheduling? I don’t think we’re reading off the same page.”

  Miles said to me, “It’s good to have you with us this morning.

  Have you filled out a visitor card?”

  “Oh.” We had. I dug it out of my jacket pocket. “Yeah, here you go.”

  But Miles was talking to the usher. “The page is right. Ron is wrong and I told him that.” He saw the visitor card in my hand.

  “No, don’t give it to me. It’s supposed to go in the offering plate.

  Were you here for the offering?”

  Suddenly I felt a little stupid. “Uh, yeah, sure. We just didn’t have it filled out in time.”

  He shook my hand again. “Well, next time just drop it in the offering plate. It’s nice to have you here.” Then he turned to the usher. “Henry and Al have it squared away. Let them handle it.”

  Marian tugged at my hand.

  I thought I was still having a conversation with Miles New-berry. “I’d like to say hello to Pastor Harris.”

  Miles Newberry smiled. “I’ll tell him you said hello.” He went back to the usher. “We’re implementing it this Sunday but locking it in next Sunday. That’s the mix-up.”

  Marian got the hint long before I did and tugged at my hand again. I finally followed.

  “Elvis has left the building,” she said.

  I looked again toward the empty platform and toward every door where people hurried to join the gridlock. No Pastor Harris.

  As a matter of fact, no pastor at all. This wasn’t the chatty, leisurely after-service leaving we were used to—this was an evacuation.

  “Please keep moving toward the doors,” said another usher, his hands extended to press upon our backs if need be. “We need to clear the building.”

  Well, I thought, this is how they do things in L.A. I have a lot to learn.

  Because we were the last shift, we could go out any door we wanted. Marian and I chose the front door again, and walked several blocks back to our car.

  “Pretty neat service,” I commented.

  “They move you through there quick, don’t they?” she replied.

  “Yeah.” At the moment I wasn’t sure whether that was good or bad.

  “He snubbed us.”

  “Huh? Who?”

  “That Miles Blueberry or whatever his name was.”

  “Well, I don’t think he meant it. He was busy.”

  “The usher was more important than we were, didn’t you notice?”

  “Well . . .” I did notice, but I didn’t want to fuel any negative feelings by saying so. “It’s a big church; they have to keep things running smoothly.”

  “Then the church is more important than us.”

  I wanted to try the church for a while. This was Southern California, I told her. People down here are used to standing in line two hours for a three-minute ride at Disneyland. They did hours of business by cell phone just waiting for a chance to pull onto Ventura Boulevard. Everywhere they went was far and through traffic, so they described distances not in miles but in minutes.

  There was more to do than time to do it. Churches could get so big that the pastor couldn’t possibly stick around to greet everyone. We could learn to live with that. We could get used to it. It was a different world down here.

  I gradually talked her over to my side. That was in the days when I prided myself on my logical, empirical way of viewing things and figured she responded too much from emotion.

  Actually, she had already seen the end from the beginning.

  We made The Cathedral of Life our church home, and just as I was raised, we never missed a service. We were there Sunday morning for whatever service could fit us in; we turned out Sunday evenings and always got in, even if we had to watch the service on closed-circuit television in an overflow room; we were there every Wednesday night without fail. We planned our day in order to make it to the Young Marrieds Sunday school class, one couple among fifty other couples. When there was a business meeting, we were there, on time, thoroughly studied, and ready to vote.

  This was a deeply religious matter for me. It was time for me to humble myself and submit to God-appointed authority. If the man of God was sharing the Word, it was our duty to be there.

  So we were always there, humble and submitted. For ten straight months we waited on the front steps for the ushers to unlock the doors, entered praising the Lord, and got out fast so the ushers could lock them again. In every service, we stood when told to stand, sat when told to sit, raised our hands, clapped our hands, said Amen, and turned to greet those around us the moment we were told to do so. Every Sunday the pastor told us to turn to someone and say to them whatever catchy phrase he wanted us to say, and we always turned and said it, laughing a social laugh at the cuteness of it. If Pastor Harris warned us against being prideful and self-willed, we repented and prayed that the Lord would help us be more childlike and submissive. When he said he saw an ugly spirit of pride attaching itself to members of the body to make them rebellious, we believed him. When he spoke about laughter being good for the soul, we all broke out laughing.

  We even did what we were told when sitting in the overflow room watching Pastor Harris on television. The image on the screen would tell us to stand, clap, greet one another, say something to somebody, repent of this or that, and say Amen if we agreed, and we did it. It was a little bizarre at first, responding and talking to a television image that didn’t see or hear us.

  It seemed odd to turn to a total stranger at Pastor Harris’s prompting and bare our souls—what we were feeling, what we were hearing from God, what we wanted to change in our lives, what temptations were still a snare to us. But we did it, and we got used to it.

  WE WERE NEW to the Young Marrieds Sunday school class: fifty couples wearing nametags and setting their own trend in polyester. During the brief coffee and fellowship time, we tried mingling. I stepped up to meet two young urban professionals, nose to nose in a theological discussion over Styrofoam cups of coffee.

  “Don’t you think the Pauline approach is epistemological, at least in part?” said one.

  “Well, only if you bring epistemology to bear on the order of the list,” said the other.

  “But I’m not talking about the specificity of the order.”

  “You can’t force the specificity.”

  “Oh no, not at all.”

  “I think Paul intended a general, well-orbed presentation. Otherwise the whole list becomes problematic. We’re distantiating election and free will.”

  “But there should be a distantiation, that’s what I’m saying!”

  Should I say hello? Would that be interrupting? Should I wait for them to notice me standing there? Should I stick my nametag on my forehead?

  They never noticed me standing there and never paused long enough for me to enter in. They just went on with their discussion, talking like Pastor Harris and oblivious to my presence.

  Perhaps I needed to learn the vocabulary. Perhaps I needed to comb my hair straight back and get a pair of white shoes and a white belt.

  Marian tried to join a conversation between three mothers.

  “Well, sometimes I spank her on her bare bottom,” said one, “but you’re talking heavy logistics!”

  The second shook her head shamingly. “But you have to deal with that spirit of rebellion! The correction has to be felt.”

  “I tried the Gerber peaches but they gave Jamie the runs,” said the third. “I
’m going through more diapers. . . .”

  “Try the peas,” said the first. “Buddy loves the peas.”

  “But Jamie hates peas.”

  The second lady leaped on that one. “Ah-ah-ah! Rebellion!

  Deal with it!”

  Marian decided it wouldn’t be courteous to introduce herself.

  Kids were the subject here, not hydraulic valves and couplers. No one asked her who she was anyway.

  We met back at the refreshment counter and picked up a cookie for each of us.

  “Well,” said one gal to her friend, “I can’t tell you the details or I’ll speak it into existence.”

  “It depends on how you phrase it, I think.”

  We headed for our seats.

  “How often do you make love?” Miles Newberry asked another couple as we walked by—he could have been a doctor asking about their frequency of bowel movement.

  Conversations in that class were a little hard to get into.

  BUT YOU could get into a program. The Cathedral of Life had programs, conceived and administered from the top down, and no program, event, or activity ever materialized without a logo. The morning service had a logo: the sun rising with little Y-shaped people praising the Lord in front of it. Wednesday night’s logo was a long, winding trail with a glowing mountain in the middle and on each end. The Young Marrieds class had a Y-shaped father and Y-shaped mother with little Y-shaped kids. Every class, every activity, every age group, had a logo.

  Our Young Marrieds class was a program with its own program, Young Marrieds Fellowship Night. Once a month, someone at the top would sort through the roster cards and assign each couple to a group of four couples. That group would then go out together and fellowship—go to dinner, play miniature golf, whatever the group coordinator decided. We all wore tee shirts with a classy looking YMFN logo on the front and a scripture, “Endeavoring to keep the Unity of the Spirit in the Bond of Peace—Ephesians 4:3,” on the back. The next month, someone would shuffle the cards so we never went out with the same people twice. To hear Miles New-berry tell it, this was to ensure a “well-orbed” relationship with the rest of the body of Christ. We went along with it, tapping colored golf balls through windmills and past waterfalls and carrying on superficial conversations, all the while stifling suggestions from Satan that the church was picking our friends for us.

  I REALLY HAD A HARD TIME getting it through my head that The Cathedral of Life did not need nor desire my help. Every church I had ever been a part of always needed help with something, whether it was teachers for the Sunday school or volunteers to clean the building once a month or just greeters to stand inside the doorway and pass out bulletins to people arriving. I was ready to be a servant, to do things the right way, to humble myself and be useful somewhere, somehow.

  “We already have a trained staff,” said the youth pastor.

  “Thanks anyway.”

  “The banjo?” said the music minister with a half-smile. “Why?”

  The chief usher shook his head. “I’ve got all the greeters I need.

  You’d have to complete a greeter program anyway, and that would require a year’s membership.”

  “We’ll talk about it, brother,” said Miles Newberry, and we never did.

  They did everything and had no procedure for dealing with two unknown faces emerging from the multitude and wanting to do something.

  So month after month we continued to show up, hurry in, praise the Lord, hear the Word, and hurry out with the thousands.

  We put our tithe check into the offering plate and supported those highly trained, handpicked folks who ran all those programs with all those logos. Surely we could get used to feeling unknown and unneeded every Sunday. Someday we would conquer the cynicism we felt every time we turned to greet those around us, knowing the likelihood of ever seeing them again.

  After all, this was our role as members.

  THE ROLE OF THE PASTORAL STAFF, apparently, was to create and maintain the proper image.

  Pastor Dale Harris took full advantage of video, which seemed reasonable, given the size his task would have been without it. The drawback for us was the subtle awareness that crept in as we sat with hundreds in an overflow room watching his image: To all the thousands, whether in the sanctuary or in the overflow room, an image was all he was and ever would be.

  When we joined the church as members, we gathered in the overflow room with about thirty others for a new members’ orientation and welcome meeting. Pastor Harris came in to greet us; and I’d never seen him so close. I’d never heard his voice unamplified. I’d never seen the natural color of his face or the blemishes on his jaw. He said a few words of introduction, and then we watched a video recording of him speaking to us about the duties and obligations of church membership.

  “Unity, unity, unity,” he said. “As God has brought us together to be stones in his temple, so we must be set in place by his Spirit and mortared to one another by love. We are a worshiping church,” he said, “and in our meetings we strive to touch the throne room of God in our praise of him.”

  “Oh dear,” he said. “Pardon me, but if this is not your heart, if you do not wish to enter the presence of God with us in this way, please don’t join the church.

  “We are to be of one mind,” he said, “an army marching together.”

  These were fair and honest words, and on their face they were agreeable enough. It was only in the months that would follow that we realized the prerequisite for such unity: the abandonment of our wills and judgment to the organic will of the thousands, which, in turn, was controlled every Sunday by the man at the top.

  The man we did not know.

  When the video ended and the screen went to snow, he returned to extend to us the right hand of fellowship and welcome us into the congregation. I can still see the face of one young man weeping, embracing Pastor Dale Harris. He was home now, part of the family. He’d found a shepherd.

  Months later, I would reflect on that moment and wonder, Did that young man know that this was the only time he would ever embrace his pastor? Did he consider that his pastor would never again touch or look him in the eye? This pastor would never turn aside to greet him by name or return his smile from the platform. After this evening, his face, his name, his very existence would drop from the pastor’s memory and the pastor would retreat once again behind his phalanx of associates who spoke his jargon and kept the machinery running from behind those dark cherry office doors.

  After this evening, Pastor Dale Harris would once again be a face, a voice, a two-dimensional, unknowable, untouchable image, and all of us would become unseen, unknown, nameless faces in the sea of thousands, all marching in step.

  I don’t suppose that young man thought of such things at the time.

  When I embraced the pastor, I wasn’t thinking of such things either.

  But I think Marian knew it all along.

  IT TOOK MY SISTER, Rene, to hit us over the head with it. She’d been hitting me over the head with her big sister wisdom ever since we were kids, so she had no qualms or hesitations. She came to visit us in the spring when we’d been at the Cathedral for ten months and been members for six. When we took her to church with us on Sunday morning, it was the first time she’d ever been there.

  We got to the sidewalk at our usual time, but for some reason the main sanctuary filled up before we could get in. The ushers, standing in a long, tight line like traffic cones, directed us downstairs into the overflow room where the television was set up. We and three hundred other people went through the Sunday routine in front of that tube, worshiping, greeting one another, saying things to each other, asking the stranger on either side a personal question about their spirituality, hearing the message, and then getting out of there, walking along another line of living trafficcones. Rene wasn’t much of a participant that morning. She just sat quietly, listening, observing, and being a courteous guest.

  Sunday evening, she didn’t become difficult
, but she did ask with wonder, “You’re going back there again?”

  I knew Rene wasn’t an avid churchgoer. Our strict, church-first upbringing seemed to have had the opposite effect on her. “Well,”

  I said, “it’s how we do things. It’s part of our covenant with the Lord and with our local church body. If the man of God is sharing the Word, it’s our duty to be there.”

  She looked horrified, but said nothing.

  She came with us to the Sunday night meeting, and this time we got into the main sanctuary but had to sit up in the balcony. I was a little nervous because she was new and hadn’t had a chance to learn the balcony rules.

  “Make sure you keep your purse tucked under your seat,” I instructed her, talking close to her ear so she could hear me over the worship music. “We have to keep the aisle in front of us clear.”

  We managed to find some seats at the very front of the balcony.

  Uh-oh. There were a lot of rules here.

  “Uh, make sure you keep your Bible beside you, not on the railing.” She moved down the pew ahead of me toward the wall.

  “No, don’t sit there, you’ll block the television lights. And don’t touch the brass railing; the fingerprints dull the shine.”

  She sat down slowly, looking at me and giving me time to stop her in case that was a wrong thing to do. I nodded to her that it was okay.

  An usher hurried up. “Pardon me, we’re trying to keep this row clear.” There were already thirty people moving down the row behind us. He called to them, “We have to keep this row clear, folks. Sorry.”

  We backed all the way out and found the next row up. It was a thirty-foot pew and there were enough bottoms to far exceed that capacity. Rene sat across the aisle from us and got out her pen to jot something down. I tried to warn her, but— Too late. An usher tapped her on the shoulder. “Excuse me. We can’t allow fountain pens in the balcony.”

  She put her pen down, stroked her forehead a moment, and then looked up at the usher. The worship singing was full and spirited, but I imagine half the balcony could hear her question.

  “Is there anything else I’m not supposed to do? Do you have a list I can read? Is there a class I can take? Is there any way I can save you the trouble of harassing me!?”