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In her column this week, Bible Girl, who has been one of the few white members at a black Pentecostal church in Dallas for 17 years, writes about racism and religion.
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I wonder which church she goes to? I ask only because I've been driving up to a Latin Mass in Dallas once or twice a month for the past few years, and I always drive past a huge megachurch. I didn't realize until just a couple months ago that it is The Potter's House, Bishop T.D. Jakes' church. Cars are often backed up the exit ramp into the highway.
I believe she goes to a little church in Oak Cliff, but I can't remember the name . She mentioned it once in a blog.
Like Lyons (aka Bible Girl) I know what it is to be the only white faces in a black church. When I lived in San Francisco, I attended a Holiness church primarily because of the music. Everyone including me had a tambourine, and the praise would rise to such a level that I would feel like I was on a hallucinogen. Of course, I was; Pentecostal exuberance. But I ultimately saw through the musical haze and saw how many women were sleeping with the preacher, (when his true mistress, the inevitable church secretary was not around) and how many men were sleeping with each other. All of which Lyons has pretty much covered in her column. Like Rod fleeing Catholicism after he saw the hierarchy in the light of day, I returned to the cathedral where I could be merely one more invisible anonymous sinner, rather than the 'pink' man seeking God in a hot tub of characters living double lies.
One of the ways Pentecostalism has failed to live up to its promise is in the area of race relations. Anecdotally, I believe there are more multicultural Pentecostal churches than multicultural "mainline" churches, but the beginning of the Pentecostal movement (at least in the U.S.) was very multicultural. William Seymour (Azusa Street Revival) was black, and many whites were impacted by the services. Also, women were able to able to serve as ministers more fully in the early Pentecostal movement than in other churches at the time.
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