An Old-Time Revival Flourishes in the Information Age

Frederick Douglas Haynes III, preacher extraordinaire, is heaving and sweating. High-fiving on the pulpit. Flapping his arms like a bird. Seamlessly shifting, in spellbinding cadence, from a newspaper article to Genesis 11 to NBA basketball to racial profiling.

“Where you are ain’t where you going! You’re stuck in an airport though God has given us a passport to fly! You can fly! Yes you can! . . . I believe we can touch the sky!”

Members of the flock at West Angeles Church of God in Christ leaps to their feet. They are laughing. Shrieking. Believing.

Behold the art of preaching at Holy Hookup 2000, a weeklong revival that ends today.

Preaching--an enduring American form of literature and rhetoric--is in major transition as a multimedia generation with short attention spans collides with preachers used to delivering long, complex orations. Many preachers feel their art needs to be recast for a new audience.

But at Holy Hookup, where 7,000 people were expected to gather throughout the week, not a video screen is in sight. The sermons are low-tech, high-octane illustrations of what the revival organizer, the Rev. Ronald L. Wright of Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church on Compton Avenue, calls the best of the black worship experience: powerful, prophetic preaching that educates, affirms and inspires.

“You have a message here that is both socially and spiritually relevant,” Wright said. “It challenges the system of social and institutional evil and . . . gives hope, meaning and light to people.”

Wright began organizing the annual revivals in 1995 as a way to reach across ecumenical divides in the African American community. Today, it has turned into a spiritual and cultural showcase for some of the nation’s most powerful black preachers--people like Haynes, 39, of Friendship-West Baptist Church in Dallas and the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., 58, of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago.

Here at the Hookup, marriages have been made, souls saved and addictions cured, Ronald Wright and others say. Emmanuel Assistant Pastor Carolyn Habersham says she was delivered from the final stages of cancer at last year’s gathering, receiving a powerful jolt of Jesus’ healing power when she was sure she was going to die.

Los Angeles resident Ann Thomas, 37, says the revival renews and refills her with God’s grace, “lets me know no matter what trials and tribulations I face, I can make it,” she said.

Elsewhere, some preachers are recasting their art using video, guest testimonies, Internet connections and the like.

At Hookup, the approach is more traditional. Here comes Jeremiah Wright, a man of graying hair, distinguished mien and three advanced degrees. He is older than Haynes, who affectionately calls him Daddy J. and regards him as his mentor. He is scholarly, and begins his sermon with a searing commentary on how history is written--fictionalized, really--by the oppressor.

But he also brings down the house. He affirms the resiliency of the black family against “the fires of forced servitude, the brutality of rape.” He invites those who are married to stand and be cheered. Having raised people’s pride, he moves in for the night’s tough teaching: how to save failing relationships.

Tying together Luke’s story of Zechariah and Elizabeth with the struggle to keep a marriage exciting and true, the preacher declares that blacks have forgotten God and fallen into promiscuity. Heed the lessons of Luke! he says: “Don’t give up on God! . . . Don’t give up on the process of marriage!”

The crowd is whooping, spirits high. It is impossible to be bored.

While sermons are central in any church, black ministers say they feel tremendous expectations to deliver something to carry their flocks through the week. A typical congregant, Ronald Wright says, comes to him with a litany of woes: I’m sick. My family’s broken. My daughter’s pregnant. My son’s in prison. Tell me, preacher, why I’m in this and how I can make a partnership with God to get out of this?

“When I’m preparing to preach, I’m always conscious of the fact that what I say on Sunday will have to equip them with dynamic, successful, empowered living on Monday,” Haynes said.

Haynes and Jeremiah Wright argue that black ministers are obliged to tackle themes of social injustice and communal responsibility. Not everyone agrees.

“My biggest criticism all the time is that I’m too black,” said Jeremiah Wright.

Some black ministers avoid talking about slavery because they believe it mires people in a victim’s mentality, he says. Others, such as the phenomenally successful preacher T.D. Jakes of Dallas, focus on messages of financial and spiritual empowerment--a trend Haynes calls a “Lotto Gospel.”

The germ of the idea for his lead-off sermon Monday began last fall, Haynes says, when he read a news article about an Iranian immigrant who lost his travel documents in France, spent 11 years living in an airport--then refused to leave, even after he got permission to do so, because he now feared flying.

The story instantly struck him as “sermonic.” The Holy Spirit, he says, supplied him with the broader message about being controlled by fear, stuck on layovers in life.

In an effort to adapt sermons to today’s changing congregants, pastors nationwide are being urged to fill sermons with personal stories rather than religious propositions.

But Jeremiah Wright says storytelling has long been a hallmark of the black sermon. He says the tradition stems from African culture, where the griot, or storyteller, was a prime fixture in village life.

Haynes also uses vivid stories to make his sermons come alive: on this night, anecdotes about his daughter, Michael Jordan, a seatmate named Juan on a recent flight. He delivers without notes, gifted with an ability to see his script in his mind’s eye.

Jeremiah Wright and other preachers at Hookup say they do not need such techniques as videos. Preaching is kept lively through constant audience participation--asking people to repeat phrases, for instance.

Haynes and Jeremiah Wright say they measure their sermons’ success through the degree of audience response and the number of people who accept Christ.

By those measures, they have clearly succeeded this night. Six people commit to Christ. After the service is over, people linger in the spiritually charged sanctuary.

Clyanthia Thomas, a 52-year-old Los Angeles homemaker, is going through a separation. Jeremiah Wright’s teachings on relationships seemed personally directed to her, she says.

“Everybody is going through some problem in life,” Thomas said, “and the way they spoke about it touched us all.”