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By Root 663 0

Spur Mission, the one whose doctrine seemed most familiar. Some my father rejected because the minister was too soft on sin; others we did not return to because the pastor thought too much of himself and not enough of his flock. My father was absolutely set in his doctrine, much of which he had determined himself. If the board of elders allowed a divorced man to sit at its meeting table, the entire church was opening itself up to sin. Did the church embrace predestination? Healing? Glossolalia? Full-immersion baptism? What was the role of women? How did the preacher’s wife comport herself? Was the youth pastor overly progressive, given more to gaining the young people’s favor than directing them down the narrow path?

Somehow, my parents settled on what I believed to be the least likely: the Assembly of God. Fundamental, certainly, but I didn’t see how this church could be any more different from the one we had left in Cardiff. The building itself was enormous: two double doors led into a foyer big enough to hold our former congregation; the sanctuary held hundreds. The choir wore purple robes, the preacher seldom lost himself in the throes of spiritual ecstasy, and the light shone through glass stained blue and green so that we all seemed to float in a landscape of water and grass.

The Assembly shared many of the same codes with the more rigid Pentecostals, but like city cousins shrugging off their country kin, the believers in the big church forsook many of the dress and behavior guidelines in favor of a more worldly existence: knees showed indelicately beneath the hems of dresses; rouge and light lipstick colored the women’s faces. Others there my age peered at me from behind their parents’ shoulders, taking in my long skirt and heavy glasses, and instead of feeling welcomed, once again part of a people who thought, acted and dressed as I did, I felt hopelessly outcast.

In Cardiff, we had been part of a community, a circle, joined with others who sang and prayed as we did. Even though our new fellow Christians spoke in tongues and professed to believe in miracles, they seemed less inclined to make a show of it all. My family bunched together at one end of a long and padded pew, holding tight to the belief that God could never approve of such giving in to the ways of the world. We sat straight-backed and lowered our voices, feeling compromised but somehow more civilized in moderation.

I could not imagine then and still am not sure why my father chose this church as our new place of worship, but we attended faithfully. He has said he found peace there. He faced head-on one of his greatest tribulations, his shyness, in order to praise God, and stood in front of the audience of hundreds to sing “Satisfied Mind” and “I’ll Fly Away” and “Life Is Like a Mountain Railroad.” I watched with nervous pride as he strummed his guitar on the big stage, his Wrangler slacks pressed to a fine shine, his Sunday boots—black eel skin—gleaming, his eyes closed.

I joined the choir, volunteered to pass out tracts. Slowly I began to make friends. I was reminded each week that the world outside loomed larger, the city a den for greed, malice and lechery. Anywhere that people gathered with no intent to call on Christ’s name could only breed sin; every bar, movie house and dance floor became the foundation for another Sodom and Gomorrah.

How can I describe the sense of fear my parents must have felt? They knew how Satan worked, tempting by degrees—first in smaller things, tiny manifestations of earthly desires: earrings, a glint of vanity, lips outlined to draw carnal attention, only a prelude to complete seduction. Each day the paper told the stories of children hooked on heroin, riots against our country, rock bands whose satanic lyrics and vulgar gyrating sent entire audiences of young people into fits of shameless sex. Having left the woods, my parents found they had entered into a whole other kind of wilderness.

I felt I had entered another world. Each night I had my music. I started school at the local junior high, and from the teachers