The Family (38 page)

There were no kids in Fort Victory on my first Sunday at New Life, the first Sunday of the year. It was a special day, “Dedication,” the spiritual anointing of the church’s new sanctuary. Metallic and modern, laced with steel girders and catwalks, the sanctuary is built like two great satellite dishes clapped belly to belly. It was designed, I was told, to “beam” prayer across the land. (New Lifers always turn to metaphors to describe their church and their city, between which they make little distinction. It is like a “training camp” in that its young men and women go forth on “missions.” It is like a “bomb” in that it “explodes,” “gifting” the rest of us with its fallout: revival, which is to say, “values,” which is to say, “the Word,” which is to say, as so many there do, “a better way of life.”)

At the heart of the sanctuary rises a four-sided stage, on either side of which are two giant cross-shaped swimming pools with mechanical covers. Above the stage a great assemblage of machinery hovers, wrapped in six massive video screens. A woman near me compared it to Ezekiel’s vision of a metallic angel, circular and “full of eyes all around.” When the lights went down and the screens buzzed to life, the sanctuary turned a soft, silvery blue. Then the six screens filled with faces of tribute, paying homage to New Life and Pastor Ted: a senator, a congressman, Colorado’s lieutenant governor, the city’s mayor, and Tony Perkins, Dobson’s enforcer on Capitol Hill; denominational chieftains, such as Thomas E. Trask, “general superintendent” of the 51 million worldwide members of the Assemblies of God; and a succession of minor nobles from the nation’s megachurches. These I know now by numbers: Church of the Highlands, in Alabama—pastored by a New Life alumnus—that has grown from 34 to 2,500 souls in the last four years; a New Life look-alike in Biddeford, Maine, that has multiplied to 5,000; Rocky Mountain Calvary, the New Life neighbor that has swelled in a decade from a handful to 6,000.

Kyle Fisk, then the executive administrator of the National Association of Evangelicals, had guided me to a seat in the front row, which meant I had to crane my neck back ninety degrees to follow the video screen above me. The worship band, dressed in black, goateed or soul-patched or shag-headed, lay flat on their backs, staring straight up. To my right sat a middle-aged woman in a floor-length flower-print dress with shades of orange and brown. Her hair was thick, chestnut, wavy, her face big-boned and raw and beautiful, her eyelids electric blue with eyeshadow when she closed them in prayer, her eyes dark and wide as she tilted her head back to watch the tributes roll past. Her mouth hung open.

The band stood. A skinny, chinless man with a big, tenor voice, Ross Parsley, directed the musicians and the crowd, leading us and them and the choir as the guitarists kicked on the fuzz and the drummer pounded the music toward arena-rock frenzy. Two fog machines on each side of the stage filled the sanctuary with white clouds. Pod-shaped projectors cast a light show across the ceiling, giant spinning white snowflakes and cartwheeling yellow flowers and a shimmering blue water-effect. “Prepare the way!” shouted Worship Pastor Ross. “Prepare the way! The King is coming!” A man in a suit in the eastern front row shuddered and shot his right foot forward and fell into a kickboxing match with the air, keeping time with the rhythm. Across the stage teens began leaping straight up, a dance that swept across the arena: kids hopped; old men hopped; middle-aged women hopped. Spinners wheeled out from the ranks and danced like dervishes around the stage. The dark-eyed woman next to me swayed, her hips filling one side of her dress, then the other, her hands waving like sea grass. The light pods dilated and blasted the sanctuary with red. Worship Pastor Ross roared, “
Let the King of Glory enter in!
” The woman beside me screamed, fell down to her knees, rocked back and forth until her arms slid out before her and her forehead tapped the carpeted floor. The guitars thickened the fuzz, and ushers rushed through the crowds throwing out rainbow glow strings, glow necklaces, glow crowns. The arena went dark, and 8,000 New Lifers danced with their glow strings, like a giant bowl of rainbow sorbet.

White light flared, blinding us, and then disappeared, leaving us in darkness again. Fog pumped out double-time. We would have been lost had it not been for the blue video glow of the six big screens. All heads tilted upward again. Watching the screens, we moved in slow motion through prairie grass. A voiceover announced, “The heart of God, beating in our hearts.” Then the music and video quickened as the camera rose to meet the new sanctuary. The woman beside me gasped. Images spliced and jumped over one another: thousands of New Lifers holding candles, and dozens skydiving, and Pastor Ted, Bible in hand, blond head thrust forward above the Good Book, smiling, finger-shaking, singing, more smiling, filling half of his face with perfect white teeth. His nose is snubby and his brow overhung, lending him an impishness crucial to the smile’s success; without that edge he would look not happy but stoned. Now Pastor Ted, wearing a puffy ski jacket in red, white, and blue, took us to the suburban ranch house where he stayed on his fateful visit to Colorado Springs; then on to another suburban ranch house, nearly indistinguishable, where he made plans for the church. Then to a long succession of one-story corporate office spaces and strip-mall storefronts, the “sanctuaries” Pastor Ted rented as his congregation grew, each identical to the last but for the greater floor space.

The lights came up. Pastor Ted, now before us in the flesh, introduced a guest speaker, one of his mentors, Jack Hayford, founding pastor of the ten-thousand-strong Church On The Way, in Van Nuys, California. Hayford is a legend among evangelicals, one of the men responsible for the revival that made
Bible-believing
churches—what the rest of the world refers to as
fundamentalist
—safe for suburbia. He is a white-haired, balding, eagle-beaked man, a preacher of the old school, which is to say that he delivers his sermons with an actual Bible in hand. (Pastor Ted uses a PalmPilot.) Pastor Hayford wanted to “wedge” an idea in our minds. The idea was “Order.” The illustration was the Book of Revelation’s description of four creatures surrounding Christ’s throne. “The first…was like a lion, the second was like an ox, the third had a face like a man, the fourth was like a flying angel.” Look! said Pastor Hayford, his voice sonorous and dignified. “All wonderful, all angels.” The angels were merely different from one another. Just, he said, as we have different “ethnicities.” And just as we have, in politics, a “hierarchy.” And just as we have, in business, “different responsibilities,” employer and employees. Angels, ethnicities, hierarchy, employers and employees—each category must follow a natural order.

Next came Pastor Larry Stockstill, from Ted’s old church in Baton Rouge, presenting yet another variation of preacher. He took the stage with his wife, Melanie, who wore a pink pantsuit. Pastor Larry wore a brown pinstripe suit over a striped brown shirt and a golden tie. His voice was Louisiana; the word
pulpit
came out as
pull-peet.

“There’s a world,” he preached, pacing across the stage. “I call it the Underworld.” The Underworld, he explained, is similar to what he sees when he goes skin diving; only instead of strange fishes, there are strange people. Too many churches, he said, focus on the Overworld. “That’s where the nice people are. The successful people. But the Lord said, ‘I’m not sending you to the Overworld, I’m sending you to the
Underworld
.’ Where the creatures are. The critters! The people who are out of it. People you see in Colorado Springs, even. You got an Underworld of people. The tattoo crowd, the people into drugs, the people into sex. You find ’em…in the Underworld.”

A
FTER CHURCH
, I crossed the parking lot to the World Prayer Center, where I watched prayers scroll over two giant flat-screen televisions while a young man played piano. The Prayer Center—a joint effort of several fundamentalist organizations but located at and presided over by New Life—houses a bookstore as well as “corporate” prayer rooms, personal “prayer closets,” hotel rooms, and the headquarters of Global Harvest, a ministry dedicated to “spiritual warfare.” The atrium is a soaring hall adorned with the flags of the nations and guarded by another bronze warrior angel, a scowling, bearded type with massive biceps and, again, a sword. The angel’s pedestal stands at the center of a great, eight-pointed compass laid out in muted red, white, and blue-black stone. Each point directs the eye to a contemporary painting, most depicting gorgeous, muscular men—one is a blacksmith, another is bound, fetish-style, in chains—in various states of undress. My favorite is
The Vessel
, by Thomas Blackshear, a major figure in the evangelical-art world. Here in the World Prayer Center is a print of
The Vessel
, a tall, vertical panel of two nude, ample-breasted, white female angels pouring an urn of honey onto the shaved head of a naked, olive-skinned man below. The honey drips down over his slablike pecs and his six-pack abs and overflows the eponymous vessel, which he holds in front of his crotch, oozing over the edges and spilling down yet another level, presumably onto our heads, drenching us in golden, godly love. Part of what makes Blackshear’s work so compelling is precisely its unabashed eroticism; it aims to turn you on, and then to turn that passion toward Jesus.

In the chapel are several computer terminals, where one can sign on to the World Prayer Team and enter a prayer. Eventually one’s words will scroll across the large flat screens, as well as across screens around the world, which as many as 70,000 other Prayer Team members are watching in their homes or churches at any moment. Prayers range from the mundane (real-estate deals and job situations demand frequent attention) to the urgent, such as this prayer request from “Rachel” of Colorado:
Danielle. 15 months old. Temperature just shy of 105 degrees. Lethargic. Won’t eat.

Or this one from “Lauralee” of Vermont:
If you never pray for anyone else, please choose this one! I’m in such pain I think I’m going to die; pray a healing MIRACLE for me for kidney problems (disease? failure?); I’m so alone; no insurance!

One might be tempted to see an implicit class politics in that last point, but to join the Prayer Team one must promise to refrain from explicitly political prayer. That is reserved for the professionals. The Prayer Team screen, whether viewed at the center or on a monitor at home, is split between “Individual Focus Requests,” such as the above, and “Worldwide Focus” requests, which are composed by the staff of the World Prayer Center. Sometimes these are domestic—
USA: Pray for the Arlington Group, pastors working with Whitehouse to renew Marriage Amendm. Pray for appts. of new justices. Pray for Pastor meetings with Amb. of Israel, and President Bush. Lord, let them speak only your words, represent YOU! Bless!
But more often they are international—
N. KOREA: Pray God will crush demonic stronghold and communist regime of Kim Jung Il.

The Iraqis come up often, particularly with regard to their conversion:
Despite the efforts of the news media, believing soldiers and others testify to the effective preaching of the Gospel, and the openness of so many to hear of Jesus. Pray for continued success!

Another prayer request puts numbers to that news:
900,000 Bibles in the Arabic language distributed by Christians in Iraq.
And one explicitly aligns the quest for democracy in Iraq with the quest for more Christians in Iraq:
May the people stand for their rights, and open to the idea of making choices, such as studying the Bible.

The most common Iraq-related prayer requests, however, are strategic in the most worldly sense, such as this one:
Baghdad—God, press back the enemy.

Behind the piano player in the main hall of the World Prayer Center, the front range of the Rocky Mountains stretched across a floor-to-ceiling, semicircular window with a 270-degree view. Above him, a globe fifteen feet in diameter rotated on a metal spindle. He played songs that sounded familiar but unnamable, the soundtrack to a sentimental movie I hadn’t seen. When he took a break, I sat with him in the front row. His name was Jayson Tice, he was twenty-five, and he worked at Red Lobster. He wasn’t from Colorado Springs, and he knew very few people who were. He’d grown up in San Diego, and once, he said, he’d been good enough to play Division I college basketball. But he broke his ankle, and because the marines promised him court time, he joined. There didn’t turn out to be much basketball for him in the marines, just what he described as “making bombs and missiles,” so he didn’t re-up. Instead, he decided to start over in a new city. His mother had moved to Colorado Springs, so Jayson and his girlfriend did, too; his mother left after three months, but Jayson had already decided that God, not his mother, had called him to the mountains. He discovered that a lot of the people he knew, working as waiters or store clerks or at one of the air force bases, felt the same way.

“Colorado Springs,” Jayson told me, “this particular city, this
one
city, is a battleground”—he paused—“between good and evil. This is spiritual Gettysburg.” Why here? I asked. He thought about it and rephrased his answer. “This place is just a watering hole for Christians. For God’s people. Something extra powerful’s about to pour out of this city. I hope not to stay in Colorado Springs, because I want to spread what’s going on here. I’m a warrior, dude. I’m a warrior for God. Colorado Springs is my training ground.”

“T
HERE
WAS
,” P
ASTOR
Ted said one afternoon in his office, “a significant influence exerted on the [2004] election by Colorado Springs.” He was meeting with me and another reporter, an Australian from a financial paper.