Memories of Revivals Past

Whenever someone tries to talk to me about the difficulty of recognizing the voice or presence of God, my mind goes back to the revivals I attended as a girl with my family. I never mention my experiences with the many fakes but also the few honest evangelists that came through town. I wouldn’t know where to begin to talk about all the confession, laughter, tears, and love that are wrapped up in all of those years. There’s no way I can make anyone understand that just beneath the surface of all the drama, the naiveté, and the farce, God was at work–not just in my life, I suppose, but in the other lives that were touched by those store-front Pentecostal revivals as well.

I always obeyed and rose from my seat when evangelists called me to the front of the church, because I believed God spoke through evangelists–not always, but enough times to warrant, if you’re around one, getting up and going to check out what he or she had to say. And even when I had my own doubts about whether certain ones could be trusted, I got up anyway when they motioned to me, out of politeness. I was certain that some evangelists had the gift and they could discern my lustful appetites, the fact that I practiced cursing around my friends and that I’d been known to swipe Butterfinger candy from the corner store. With all the guilt I carried around inside, I was sure that sooner or later one of them would announce to the whole church that he could see straight through to my wicked heart. But none of them did. If they ever saw the truth, they never told my secrets. What they spoke about instead was of my being chosen by God for some special work, of some special destiny on the horizon for me, or some such babble. All of which meant next to nothing to my adolescent heart at the time.

Of course, education is designed to kill some things. In exchange for access into upper class mobility you must agree to look with contempt and embarrassment upon all the experiences and memories from your lower or worker class past that shaped you. Now that I’m a scholar I’m supposed to look back and laugh at all those nights I spent in church revivals when I was a girl. How stupid could I have been back then? What a bunch of ignoramuses those of us in the church were to be under the spell of one jack-leg, uneducated, cunning evangelist after another who did nothing more than tap into our working-class fears, exploit our plebian weaknesses, and tell us things our down-trodden hearts wanted to hear. In exchange for the placebos, we flocked to their altar night after night and laid at their feet our rent money, our grocery money, children’s lunch money, and the carfare we had to get to work. What a sight! How sad. How pitiful. And what does any of us have to show for all that belief? A heart full of hope which keeps incorrigible scholars like myself thirty years later still rising from my seat when I feel myself pulled by some unknown force and tiptoeing to the altar in the hopes that perhaps this is the night. Perhaps I will glimpse God. If nothing else, I sure could do with someone touching me on my shoulders and whispering to me that I'm special, that there's a purpose for my being alive, and that what I'm doing is not in vain.

Renita J. Weems, Ph.D.

(Adapted from Listening for God: A Minister's Journey Through Silence and Doubt by Renita J. Weems (Simon & Schuster, 1999)