Pentecostals of the Fox Cities

Pentecostals of the Fox Cities

Appleton church #1

441 Freeway

to downtown Appleton

Midway

Road

Pentecostals of the Fox Cities Church image from Google Earth

Pentecostals of the Fox Cities Surveying the churches of Appleton we could distinguish two dominant location-types. First are stand-alone churches embedded in older residential neighborhoods. Second would be locations on the outskirts of the city yet near large suburban-style housing developments. The Pentecostals of the Fox Cities belongs to neither of these two dominant location-types, and so we might assign it to a third category of churches that attempt to just insert themselves wherever they can.

The church is located along Midway Road, which, as its name suggests, occupies a middle point between Appleton and nearby Menasha. Neighboring structures to this church include Accurate Appraisal as well as Advanced Tooling Services, Inc. The largest nearby property is the campus for UW Oshkosh/Fox Valley, a two year college. It is an industrial or work centered section of Appleton, and the structures along this road are plain and make no attempt at any sort of architectural statement. The Pentecostals of the Fox Cities occupies a connected group of structures which give no outward sign of having been originally con-

structed as a church. It is clear that these structures were built originally for some business use and were later re-purposed as a church.

The preferred layout for churches these days is a large open atrium at the place where congregants enter. In a large church this area might feature a full Starbucks-style cafe, but even small churches have a bank of thermoses waiting to dispense free coffee to visitors. Seats and tables are often set out in this open atrium, hinting that congregants should consider lingering here to talk. The more traditional style of church, often with a strong connection to a denomination, will have a narrow vestibule at the entrance, and congregants are quickly funneled right into the sanctuary. A common upgrade for churches these days is to move from that traditional and inconspicuous entrance to a larger atrium for an entrance.

The Pentecostals of the Fox Cities has no contemporary entrance, and there is not even any coffee on offer. Nothing is in the entrance area except a table with a sign up for an upcoming event. The entrance is a blank space to be passed through quickly on the way to the sanctuary.

The sanctuary itself is a rectangular room without windows. The platform, where musicians and speakers stand, sits obliquely on the northwest corner of the room. The congregation sits in rows of padded seats, arranged theater-style around the raised platform. But no art or visual display of any sort enlivens the blank walls. At the back of the room is a raised booth where the sound equipment is kept, but no video cameras are visible anywhere. And that’s another oddity: most contemporary churches appear to believe in the necessity of a direct link between the service and the internet. Sermons are given and then pop up on the church website with little delay. The num- image from Google Earth ber of viewers may be quite low, but part of being a real church, it would seem, is to post sermons online.

A lack of resources is one possible reason for the undeveloped entrance and absence of video equipment. But something more is going on. The worship service proceeds on a quite different logic than is common in most contemporary churches. Take the lack of a video camera. The service as a

whole resists easy video capture. It starts with 45 minutes of singing, but this ends with a 10 minute period in which congregants go forward to pray around the front platform. During that time there is laying on of hands and speaking in tongues, while the people remaining in their seats talk casually with one other.

The sermon proper then starts up and goes for another 45 minutes, but this dissolves seamlessly into yet another period where congregants gather at the front, this time they were seeking prayer for a healing. As a result, the two plus hours of worship time does not hum along, but sputters and stalls from the perspective of a casual visitor.

But that is just it: such a visitor is not the audience the leaders of this church have in mind. The service is oriented toward the needs of those who are moving forward and participating.

Contemporary churches mostly format their services to meet the imagined expectation of an interested visitor, watching either from a seat in the church or on the internet. It is strangely refreshing to attend a service that dares to be boring

for those who are not physically involved in the physical movement of the service.

The message of the church was explicitly aimed at those looking for a miracle. I am sure that the leadership of the church would embrace that statement. The pastor and the guest speaker were not dispensing rational steps for limiting anxiety or building a closer walk with God. They were speaking to people who needed a miracle in their lives stat, whether one related to healing, finances, or a relationship. A situation might look hopeless, but God is always able to transform it.

The guest speaker was a former pastor from image from Google Earth Two Rivers, Wisconsin, a small community along Lake Michigan. He and his wife would be leaving soon to take up a year long position in Malta, filling in during for a missionary furlough. When he asked the congregation for a show of hands as to how many people knew where Malta was, only a handful of the 200 or so people present raised their hands. He explained that he would be leading Bible classes for lay

Christian leaders from North Africa and the western Mediterranean. He launched into a sermon on the topic of faith as described in Hebrews 11. But careful analysis of a biblical passage was not the point, and not much sticks with me from that.

What does stay with me is the story he told near the end of the sermon. Some years ago, when the speaker was pastor at a church out in Berlin (another small city in northeast Wisconsin), a man named Mike, with biceps the size of thighs, had attended his church. Mike was somewhat surly, and for awhile stopped coming to church, but a couple of years later he was suddenly back.

He had come forward for healing prayer at the end of the sermon and motioned to the pastor to come over to him. He leaned forward and told the pastor that he had been told by a doctor that he had an advanced case of cancer and needed prayer.

So the pastor was going through his usual motion of dabbing oil on his finger to wet the forehead of the person who needed healing, but Mike suddenly asked him to use the whole bottle. So the pastor poured

that whole bottle of oil over Mike’s head.

He described how it trickled into Mike’s beard and then dripped onto the floor.

And he prayed intensely for Mike. And two weeks later Mike was back and almost ran forward to tell the pastor that he had been back to the doctor and was now cancer free. The pastor had two further examples of the healing value that came with a liberal dose of oil poured out on the head, such as a family with a boy who acted out in church image from Google Earth because of his autism, but then came a letter that after prayer this boy had been 95 percent cured.

After these stories the congregation at the Pentecostals of the Fox Valley was more than ready for some serious and well-oiled healing prayers. Even before the pastor could wrap things up, I saw several people walking quickly to the platform, and the pastor asked them what they needed prayer for. Sitting near the back I could not hear everything they said, but one person had an ear problem and another needed prayer for her son.

Before long about half the congregation was standing up in the front. The speaker along with the church pastor and some assistants were making their way among all these people, laying hands on them and praying passionately for their ailments. There was a part of me that felt like this dangled promise of a miracle was a dishonest way stir unbounded hopes.

I began to feel more compassionate as I looked out on the knot of people and saw all the touching and holding and weeping.

The offer of a miracle might be the needed catalyst for people to interact in this physically connected way.

It’s a kind of emotional closeness, possible here even for groups of men, that is impossible to imagine at a standard Evangelical church.

Who are these people who come to the Pentecostals of the Fox Cities looking for a miracle? The congregation was diverse in ways that many Appleton churches are not. Several black families were in attendance. I arrived to church at the same time as a woman who was speaking to her two young children in Spanish. The

church itself was largely white, but my visual judgment was that this was a blue collar crowd. I saw little of the manner and cut of clothes that tend to represent professional work or wealth. That needs and interests of that professional crowd is better addressed by the rationalism

By Martyn Smith visit May 5, 2019

of Evangelical churches, where steps for success and spiritual growth are calmly laid out. What I was seeing here was a group of people who hope for and needed a change that might appear from out of the blue.