Inside a service at Rod Parsley's World Harvest Church

It doesn't seem right not to be there and experience it in order to give it a fair hearing. And that's what I did, and it's just phenomenal. A beautiful facility. It's perfectly lit for television--it's first class, basically. The people are extremely friendly, and very welcoming, very accomodating to me. I wasn't particularly social there, but everybody was just great people.

It's a show unlike anything that anything you've seen--it's certainly unlike any church service I've ever been to before. It seems to me that the objective of it is to work people into a sort of frenzy. And throughout the evening it's meant to climax. There's a climax here, but that's not the big one, there's a higher climax and a higher climax. You're exhausted when you leave even if you're not an active participant. Literally, I was tired when I went home. It's skillful and it's *so* high energy and so intense, and the energy of it is so contagious, you just feel it.

The first thing that I noticed is that I didn't see a bible anywhere. Some people had brought their own, and maybe there were some but I wasn't looking in the right place. But I'm so conditioned to looking at the back of the pew and there they are. The book itself didn't strike me as a huge part of the service, in the traditional sense, in that nobody was reading it, nobody was looking at it, there didn't seem to be direct citations to it. It was more just on a level of the senses, on a level of God's power and God's glory, but not necessarily God's commandments, I suppose--God's tenets, or anything of that nature.

There were a number of, I don't know what you'd call them. I don't want to be crass, but "opening acts" to sort of work the crowd up. The singers were phenomenal, working the crowd into a frenzy, and you wait and wiat. I don't know how long, but maybe an hour and 15, hour and a half before Rod Parsley hit the stage. When he does so, he very gradually takes over the program from the pastors and preachers who are up there opening the show. Very gradually, and at that point, I don't know how the audience keeps going, but they do. There is just a real connection there between Rod Parsley and his congregants--it's palpable. You can feel it.

Within five minutes--and this is what struck me probably more than anything else when I was there--within five minutes of his taking the stage and beginning to speak, he performed a faith healing. A gentleman came up with pain in the lower back, and Parsley laid hands and cured it. And he said that in curing the back pain of this one particular person, he had cured the lower back pain of everyone else in the room. And what struck me about that was, when you think about that, again, it's not for me to mock what anyone believes. But when you think about a man within five minutes can perform a faith healing on every person in the room, and he's established such credibility, and inspired such passion and such belief, and such faith in people, that that's sort of accepted without question. Without any sort of deeper analysis. It was part of the show. To me, it was just astounding, just incredible. But it was par for the course. That was the first 5-10 minutes of the program, and it goes on from there.

...he was pacing back and forth across the stage, and carrying on a conversation with God at the time, and God was giving him directions for what to say to the congregants, and what he could and could not say. He got to the point where he was choked up, and couldn't look at the audience. He did have a bible. He was holding his bible and hiding his face, saying "I can't look at you, I can't look at you!" He was pacing the stage, pacing the stage, and saying "I can't look at you, I can't look at you!" It was just incredible theater, just amazing.

So we've gone from this faith healing, to a direct conversation with God, in full witness of however many thousand people were there at the time. And when you think about that, and I could tell you more and more about it, and I do recommend that you go--not to be confrontational or to cause trouble, but just to see it, just to know it. Or at least watch it on television over the weekend. I would encourage that very strongly. But what strikes me so much is that, when people who follow you and believe in you believe that you *are* speaking to God, and that you do have what would be to me, miraculous capacity to cure somebody, through faith. When you have convinced people of that, and when you have thousands of people who do believe in you so deeply, really, what *can't* you convince people to do? If it comes down to saying, "Can you volunteer to help our voter registration effort?" Are you willing to do this or that for this cause that we're working for?" I can't imagine anyone saying no to that.