photo © 2010 Andy Coan | more info (via: Wylio)So here's part two of my
First Church of the Holy Rollers blog series. In this section, I learn how to speak Christianese, and then have my first encounter with speaking in tongues.
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During those early months, the Holy Roller Church taught me everything I needed to know about speaking Christianese. For those who don’t know, Christianese is the special language that evangelical Christians speak to each other in to make everything in life sound so much more spiritual. For example, when someone says, “How are you?” you’re supposed to respond with, “Blessed!” You can’t say, “Oh, I’m doing alright” or else you’ll give people the impression that your cup’s not overflowing with God’s incredible blessings.
Another key word is “sow.” The Bible was written for an agrarian society, so farming metaphors are used a lot. Unfortunately most of us live in the suburbs, so it’s kind of funny to use the sowing metaphor constantly. But this didn’t stop the Holy Roller Church. No matter what you did in life, you were sowing some sort of seed that God was going to make grow. This was especially true with money. In fact, the Holy Roller Church was raising money to build a real church a few miles away, so they were always asking for tithes and the occasional “love offering.” Whenever they needed some extra cash, Pastor Dave would say, “Remember, ‘God shall not be mocked, for whatever a man shall reap he shall sow.’ In fact, once we get our building up I think we’re going to just have a big sign outside our door that says, ‘God shall not be mocked.’”
Years later I looked up the passage Pastor Dave was talking about. It didn’t mention anything about money.
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The first time I heard anyone at the Holy Roller Church speak in tongues, I thought they were speaking Latin.
It happened one night during Wednesday night Bible study. Pastor Dave was out of town, so his wife Pastor Jenny led the night’s lesson in his place. She was the epitome of a Pentecostal wife: hair that was held together with half a can of hairspray, a woman’s suit jacket no matter how hot it was outside, and a voice that sounded like she was about to burst into tears at any moment.
And I guess there was something about that almost-in-tears voice that stirred up the Holy Spirit that night. When we started praying I heard Robert speak in another language. I figured maybe he used to be a Catholic and remembered some of those old Latin prayers. Then I heard Petey speak in the same language, then some one else, and finally Pastor Jenny.
Do all of these people know Latin? Then I remembered something Pastor Dave said a few weeks ago about speaking in tongues, that it was supposedly the Holy Spirit speaking through you.
Oh, so this is what speaking in tongues is all about. For a moment I was worried that I was going to start speaking in tongues, but even as everyone else was having orgasmic prayers I said nothing.
I could never get into the orgasmic praying and the tongue talking. When I felt the Holy Spirit, I never felt “on fire” like some of the others. Instead I felt this great sense of peace, like a cool breeze just brushed my face. Everything was okay, despite how messed up my circumstances were at the time. That’s how I knew it was God; it was the peace I wanted more than anything else in the world.
Of course, being the only non-tongue-talker at the Holy Roller Church, I felt out of place sometimes. To make sure I didn’t stand out to much, I sometimes blurted out “be-bop-a-lu-la” when everyone else was speaking in tongues.
