2

Old-Time Religion

Do you handle snakes?” It was the last question in my very first interview for a full-time job in ministry.

The interview was held in the youth room of Covenant United Methodist Church, a cavernous space overlooking the church’s gym. Huddled around a rectangular table that had been hauled up to the youth room just for the occasion were the associate pastor, a parent, a youth worker, a couple of teenagers, and me. My interviewers were all wonderful, welcoming people with whom I would soon get to share several years of my life. But the thing I’ll always remember about that first interview is the last question.

“What was that?” I replied.

The parent asked it again. “Is it true that Nazarenes handle snakes?”

There was a moment of silence as the rest of the interview committee leaned in anxiously, waiting to hear my response.

I let them squirm for a bit, and then deadpanned, “Only on the weekends.”

Just so we’re all on the same page: that was a joke. Thankfully, they recognized it as such, and we all had a good laugh. The tension of the moment gave way to friendship that would last for years to come.

Personally, I hate snakes. I’m sure some Nazarenes have pet snakes at home, but you won’t find snake handling happening on a Sunday morning in any Nazarene church anywhere. Nevertheless, it’s a question you get a lot when you tell people you belong to a little-known denomination with a funny sounding name. But again—and I can’t stress this enough—we don’t handle snakes. We don’t speak in tongues either, something else outsiders assume we do. Not that I can blame them. The Church of the Nazarene was originally named the Pentecostal Church of the Nazarene, but we changed that not long after our founding to distinguish ourselves from our more charismatic brothers and sisters.

That’s not to say the Church of the Nazarene lacks charisma. It has some—or at least it used to. We have people raise their hands during church services and shout “Amen!” most Sunday mornings. I can still remember Sunday services and camp meetings I went to when I was growing up, where some of the older Nazarenes ran the aisles during worship. But it’s been a long time since I’ve seen anyone running the aisles. We still have camp meetings, although they’re typically less rustic than they used to be. If you were looking for snakes in the Church of the Nazarene, that would be the place to find them. The old open-air tabernacle at my church district’s campground in the woods of Dickson, Tennessee, was known to have snakes drop down from the rafters and into the choir loft during service. Sadly, future generations of Nazarenes won’t get to enjoy such a spectacle, as the open-air tabernacle has been replaced with a modern air-conditioned facility.

But holiness, that stalwart of old-time religion and revivals, is still managing to hang around in the Church of the Nazarene. I don’t mean that in a negative way, more in the sense that a lot of Nazarenes of my generation don’t give holiness the attention that it used to receive in our tradition. Pastors are an exception. When we fill out the annual paperwork for our minister’s license, there’s a question that reads “How many people have been entirely sanctified under your ministry in the past year?” Entire sanctification is our term for holiness. Even as a lifelong Nazarene and ordained elder, I find it to be, at best, a strange question. But among many lay Nazarenes, especially those who might be new to the denomination, holiness doesn’t come up as often as it used to.

Entirely sanctified

The old-timers understandably lament the fact that holiness has fallen off the radar in some Nazarene churches. Holiness is why our denomination was created in the first place. The first Nazarenes were largely Methodist preachers who believed that Methodism had lost its zeal for holiness. Holiness doctrine is not exclusive to Methodism, but thanks to its founder John Wesley, it is a distinguishing emphasis in Wesleyan theology and the Methodism he and his brother Charles created.

The basic idea of holiness is that God has called Christians to a life set apart from the ordinary ways of the world and devoted completely and in every way to following Jesus. It’s not a bad idea—really, it’s just Christianity 101. But over the years, holiness has developed a . . . well . . . not-so-great reputation. If you were to ask someone what they know about holiness, their thoughts would probably land somewhere between “What is that? It sounds weird” and “Isn’t that just a bunch of legalism?” To be fair, there’s a little bit of truth in both assumptions.

In the early days—and by early days I mean up until the early 1980s, when I was born—being entirely sanctified didn’t just mean you didn’t lie or steal or cheat or commit other Ten Commandment–style sins. Sanctification also meant you didn’t smoke or drink or play cards or dance or go to the movies or wear gold jewelry or pants (if you were a lady) or . . . well, you get the picture. A lot of that legalism has, thankfully, gone the way of New Coke. But a lot of it remains. Nazarenes are still teetotalers, at least officially. Until fairly recently, boys and girls weren’t allowed to swim together at church camp. At my Nazarene college we couldn’t wear shorts until the afternoon, and never in class. And you’re still not likely to find a Nazarene on the dance floor (though that is more likely due to a genetic lack of coordination than any legislated prohibition). Nazarenes are now free to dance, according to our denominational manual. We can also go to movies, play cards, and wear jewelry, and we have finally permitted women to wear pants and everyone to wear shorts on campus before three in the afternoon.

It may sound silly in retrospect, but in the beginning holiness was a very noble, if sometimes misdirected, pursuit. As I said, the emphasis on holiness predates the Church of the Nazarene. Our theology is that of the original Methodist John Wesley, who, during a service at the Aldersgate church in London, heard a reading from Martin Luther’s preface to his commentary on the book of Romans and felt his heart “strangely warmed.” People got excited about odd things back then. But who can blame them? Netflix was still centuries away. Anyway, with his heart strangely warmed, Wesley sought out to develop a form of Anglicanism—he was a member of the Church of England—that was methodical in its approach to Christian discipleship. He wanted a faith intentional in its discipleship so as to create disciples whose lives were more reflective of Jesus and were purified of all sin.

To be clear, Wesley didn’t invent the idea of holiness or entire sanctification. The call to holiness is biblical. From almost the very beginning of the story of the people of God, God has called the people of Israel to “be holy, for I am holy” (Leviticus 11:45). The books of Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy don’t just list random laws to make life for the people of Israel more difficult; they’re showing the people of God how to live holy lives. The cry of the prophets is a call to return to the life of holiness that God expected Israel to live out. Jesus picks up on this foundational call to holiness in the Sermon on the Mount, in which he calls his followers to love their enemies so that they will “be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48). The apostle Paul continues this call to holiness (Romans 12:1; 2 Corinthians 7:1), as do the writer of Hebrews (Hebrews 12:14) and Peter in his first epistle (1 Peter 1:15-16).

Holiness didn’t disappear after the early days of the church or remain in hiding until John Wesley came along in the eighteenth century, but Wesley did give holiness its shape as a distinctive doctrine in the modern era of the church, which led his theological heirs—folks like the great nineteenth-century revivalist preacher Phoebe Palmer—to declare it a second work of grace after salvation. The idea was that we are saved but still need to go through the process of purification from the sinful nature we have been saved from. The methods of Methodism were created to help make that process happen.

As the doctrine of entire sanctification developed, crossed the Atlantic, and took hold in the fertile soil of the Third Great Awakening, the fervent atmosphere of the Awakening’s revivals transformed what was once seen as a lifelong process that may or may not reach completion in this life into something that could happen to a person, in an instant, down at an altar. All you had to do was say a prayer and in an instant you would be purified from sin. Forever. Again, if you think that’s an audacious claim, you’re not alone. Many Nazarenes agree.

But not all. Once upon a time, a pastor friend of mine was sitting in his ordination interview when one of the board members asked him, “Are you entirely sanctified?” It’s a question every potential Nazarene pastor is asked. As have many in my generation of Nazarenes, my friend replied that he believed he was in the process of being entirely sanctified.

That answer satisfied most of the board, but not all. One member spoke up and said, “Well, I still remember the exact day I was entirely sanctified. I was twelve years old. God sanctified me holy and I haven’t sinned since.” Without skipping a beat, one of the other board members looked over at him and said, “Well, you just did.”

Holiness as service to the poor

Holiness wasn’t always that wonky, at least not completely. When the Church of the Nazarene first began, it was led by a man named Phineas F. Breese. Breese was the pastor of the appropriately named First Church of the Nazarene in Los Angeles, California, just a stone’s throw away from where the famous Azusa Street Revival occurred, giving birth to modern Pentecostalism. The revivalism of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries certainly shaped Breese and other early Nazarenes, and Breese held fast to certain social rules that today we would probably label as legalism. But Breese’s understanding of holiness was very different from the caricature that holiness has become in the eyes of many people today.

For Breese, the church existed for the least of these. For him, the gospel really was good news for the poor, not just an abstract list of doctrines or a magic prayer. Breese believed that holiness was to be lived out through a life of service to the poor, the lost, the least, and the dying. He famously described his vision for the Church of the Nazarene with these words: “Let the Church of the Nazarene be true to its commission; not great and elegant buildings; but to feed the hungry and clothe the naked and wipe away the tears of sorrowing, and gather jewels for His diadem. . . . The gospel comes to a multitude without money and without price, and the poorest of the poor are entitled to a front seat at the Church of the Nazarene.”¹

It is for that reason that I’m still a Nazarene today. I’m not interested in legalism, but the idea that the Christian life should center on caring for the poor and the least of these isn’t just something I can get on board with; it’s something Jesus himself seemed to think was at the center of both the gospel and salvation itself. If that’s holiness, then sign me up.

Be perfect or go to . . .

Unfortunately, Breese’s approach to holiness wasn’t the only version of entire sanctification I was taught growing up. In fact, as I understood it, holiness was much more about what I didn’t do than what I actually did do for others. Holiness wasn’t something I celebrated for what it could be; it was something I was actually kind of terrified of. I was never explicitly taught that if I wasn’t entirely sanctified I would go to hell, but that always seemed to be the message. Not being entirely sanctified felt like being a second-class citizen, an outsider removed from the holy club. In a world where only those on the inside get to go to heaven, the math was easy even for a kid: be perfect or go to hell.

That’s what I thought being a Christian meant: being perfect. Or at least trying every day to be perfect. It wasn’t an abstract theological concept to me. I took it literally—as in never make a mistake, ever, and if you do, run down to the altar, don’t pass go, don’t collect $200, and pray for forgiveness as soon as you can, literally. I typically got saved multiple times a year. Once in the summer at church camp, for sure; there was always a Wednesday night youth meeting that would do the trick; a visiting preacher could usually guilt me down to the altar; and if there was one of those big citywide Christian youth events, I was always the first one to the altar. Of the two million or so souls Billy Graham is said to have saved, I probably accounted for about half those professions of faith.²

I’ve also been entirely sanctified quite a few times as well. The first time I ever fretted about it was right before I got baptized. I was in middle school, and the week before I was scheduled to be dunked under water, I had a spiritual panic attack. I wasn’t sure whether I should even be allowed to be baptized because I wasn’t sure I was entirely sanctified. I talked to one of my youth workers about it, because even though I had said a prayer and asked God to entirely sanctify me, I didn’t feel entirely sanctified. Thankfully, that youth leader assured me that it was okay to be in the process of sanctification. But when I gave my testimony to the congregation that had gathered in our church’s fellowship hall to witness the baptism, I made sure to let everyone know I had asked God to entirely sanctify me. I didn’t want anyone being baptized after me to think I had defiled the sacred water.

But it wasn’t just baptism I was worried about. From a very young age I carried a deep sense of guilt about everything I did. Once, during elementary school, I accidentally walked out of a craft store with some small toy I had forgotten that I was still holding when my mom rushed us out of the store and on to the next errand. I had a spiritual panic attack before we even stepped off the sidewalk, because I was certain I was heading to jail and from there straight to hell. Thankfully, I was able to turn around, return to the store, and put the toy back on the shelf without being arrested and shipped off to prison.

A few years later I got my first pocketknife. I felt like such a grownup. I loved that thing. But, as every kid does with their first pocketknife, I soon cut myself while trying to whittle a stick into, um, a pointier stick. I still have the scar—both literally and emotionally. I was terrified of my mom taking away my pocketknife, so I lied and said I had cut my thumb on a jagged edge on the bathroom sink. My mom bought it, but my guilt consumed me—so much so that, while staying overnight at my grandmother’s house a short time later when my parents were out of town, I woke her up in the middle of the night to confess my sin. My grandma rolled over, confused, and said sleepily, “Okay, whatever”—or whatever the granny equivalent of “Okay, whatever” is. “I’m sure your mother doesn’t care,” she added, and promptly went back to sleep. But the situation wasn’t trivial to me. It was a big deal, dire even. I had sinned. I wasn’t holy anymore. I had to confess and re-up on my sanctification or Satan would come looking for me to drag me down into the abyss. So I woke her back up and insisted she tell my mom. I finally wore her down and she agreed.

Cheating in school? Forget about it. I would rat myself out to my teacher if I even accidentally caught a blurred glance at an answer on a neighbor’s test—after I already had that answer filled out on my own test. Secular music? No way. That stuff was for heathens. Now, this wasn’t a family rule or anything. My mom listened to oldies in the car and loved Motown, but I didn’t want to take any chances. So I silently judged her and made sure my own music collection was composed of only godly Christian music. My first album? Steven Curtis Chapman’s Heaven in the Real World. I loved it. Had every song committed to memory within a week of first popping it into my Sony Discman. But Michael W. Smith’s greatest hits collection, The First Decade, was the best music in the history of the universe. To me, music didn’t get any better than his ode to country preachers, “Kentucky Rose.”

Cigarettes and alcohol? Yeah, right. I would verbally accost smokers in public (behind their backs, obviously—I was too much of a coward for direct confrontation). The closest thing to alcohol I got was Martinelli’s sparkling apple cider. My Christian friends and I used to get a bottle of that stuff every year for the youth group’s annual New Year’s Eve party and pretend we were drinking champagne. We were so cool.

Even my clothes had to be holy. If there was a Christianized version of a pop culture icon screen-pressed onto a T-shirt, I had the shirt. I lifeguarded throughout high school, and you best believe I had a “Jesus is my lifeguard” shirt. And “What would Jesus do?” bracelets—what color do you want? I have one in every shade of the rainbow.

I had to have all my bases covered. Entire sanctification meant entire, and I didn’t want to take the chance that, come judgment day, Jesus would uncover an area of my life that wasn’t entirely sanctified and I would be cast out into the darkness. It was probably that scenario, more than anything else, that scared me the most.

Like a lot of other conservative evangelical Christians, I grew up being told that on judgment day, we wouldn’t just stand before the pearly gates and be told either “Come on in!” or “See you never, sinner!” No. Instead, Jesus would call each of us up, one by one, in front of all humanity and the heavenly host. He would read out every single sin we had ever committed, and maybe even show them all on a giant video screen so everyone could watch and join the judgmental festivities. Billions upon billions of people would find out that I almost stole a toy from a craft store when I was eight years old. Hell seemed like a trip to Disney World by comparison.

That’s not to say hell didn’t loom large in my mind too. It did. But my fear of hell didn’t come from my parents, or really anybody else in my family. My grandmother was probably the most sanctified among us. She didn’t drink or smoke, didn’t have pierced ears, and to this day has never even been to a movie theater; but even she never tried to scare me into loving Jesus

My fear of hell came from others, preachers mostly, but concerned old folks at church, televangelists, and Christian media played a big role too. I don’t remember the first time I thought about hell, but I’ll never forget all the times after that. They happened all the time, but never more vividly than at that most sacred of evangelical childhood church rituals: church camp.

Hearts and farts

When you grow up in a conservative holiness tradition, even children’s camp is tinged with a bit of turn-or-burn theology. Not a lot, but nightly sermons reminded us that the alternative to not going down to the altar and asking Jesus into our hearts would be, well, not good.

Altar calls were such a regular part of my youth that, like the salvation they offered me, they’ve become a bit of a blur—except for the altar call at church camp when I was in sixth grade. That one I will never forget. I was sitting in the back row with a friend, and we were laughing hysterically during worship time. The worship songs themselves weren’t funny. We had simply taken it on ourselves to change the words “Heart, heart, I’ve got Jesus in my heart” to “Fart, fart, I’ve got to fart.” It was comedy gold, at least to two eleven-year-olds. Not so much to our camp counselors, who kept telling us to keep quiet and pay attention. And we did, at least on the outside. They couldn’t keep us from singing about farts in our head!

Eventually, the music stopped and the speaker took the stage. I don’t remember a word he said, but I do remember the overwhelming sense of guilt he laid on me. Or maybe it was the Holy Spirit. The speaker would have said it was the latter; looking back, I’m pretty sure it was just the former, but maybe it was a little bit of both. Either way, I was terrified that my emerging career as the Christian “Weird Al” Yankovic had me in danger of the fires of hell if I didn’t rush down to the altar immediately to get saved for the I-don’t-know-what time. By that age I had lost track.

I don’t know if you’ve ever gone down for an altar call, at church camp or elsewhere. But there’s an unspoken awkwardness about all altar calls, and it has nothing to do with kneeling down in front of a bunch of strangers. It’s the matter of when do you leave. Sure, the obvious answer would seem to be whenever the preacher has stopped praying. But if that is the obvious answer to you, then either you have never been to an altar call or you pray a lot longer than I do.

I’m just not a prayer warrior. Never have been. I don’t mean I don’t pray. I just mean that I have a hard time praying for longer than, say, a minute or two. I get down to the altar, say what needs to be said, and then I’m done. That night at church camp I found myself, as I so often did, stranded at the altar without anything else to pray about. I had gotten saved—again—and in my sixth-grade understanding of altar calls, that was all you went down to the altar to pray about—unless you needed to be healed from something. I was healthy and saved and stuck.

So I started listening to what the preacher was talking about in his prayer. Holiness preachers tend to do that during altar calls—they’ll squeeze in a second mini sermon in hopes of either saving a few more souls or covering a few theological points they missed in their sermon. This guy had the nerve to suggest that maybe there was something more to Christianity than just being saved. Maybe being saved was just the beginning, he said; maybe God was calling us to do something more. Maybe God was calling us to devote our entire lives to service in the kingdom of God. Maybe God was even calling some of us to full-time ministry.

Remember why I was down there in the first place: I was terrified I was going to hell for turning a praise and worship chorus into a song about farting. Even though I had just gotten saved—again—I was worried God was still mad and that eternal punishment awaited.

This was it.

Here was my punishment.

God would punish me for singing about farts by calling me to be a pastor.

As an eleven-year-old, I could think of nothing more terrifying than being a senior pastor. Scared out of my mind at the thought of having to wear a suit and tie for the rest of my life, I went into negotiation mode with God. For the first time in my entire life I had something to pray about during the entirety of an altar call. I don’t remember the exact details of our negotiation, but I do know it was intense. And I know what we finally settled on. Or at least what I decided we had settled on.

I would devote my life to God somehow—just not as a senior pastor. Oh, and not as a missionary to Africa, because that was just way too far away and did they even have a Chick-fil-A there? I mean, what was I supposed to eat in Africa if there was no Chick-fil-A? So obviously that was a no-go. We—and by we I mean I—settled on “Okay, I’ll do some kind of ministry someday probably, maybe.”

That was the cycle of my childhood and teenage years: get saved, sin, go down to an altar, get saved again, rinse and repeat. The fear of going to hell consumed my every waking hour. I didn’t care how many times I had to go down to the altar. If it kept me from being poked with a burning pitchfork for all eternity, I would go.

I had given my life over to Jesus out of love, but fear began to drive the relationship: fear of disappointing Jesus, disappointing my parents, getting either one of them angry, going to hell. And eventually, fear of being left behind.

I think that’s why I fell so hard for the rapture. It eased my fears. It promised that I wouldn’t be left behind to be tortured on earth or sent down to hell to be tortured for eternity. All I had to do was believe.

End-times theology wasn’t a radical turn in my spiritual journey. It was the natural evolution of my faith, the only place my faith was headed.

Apocalyptic intoxication

End-times theology is the American Christianity of my youth in a nutshell. It’s driven by fear, it’s focused on “me” and the goal of personal salvation, and it promises vengeance against our enemies at the end. It’s driven by the fear of being left behind at the rapture, fear of what is supposed to happen at the end of time, and ultimately the fear of hell. But it’s also about fear of the Other. Anyone who doesn’t believe the same way—anyone who isn’t a rapture-believing Christian, or doesn’t believe in biblical inerrancy, or thinks it took longer than six days to create the world—becomes the enemy, or at least an unwitting agent of the enemy. Salvation comes not just in the form of avoiding hell but also in the form of escape from the worries of this world. The salvation promised by end-times theology also promises the eternal satisfaction of seeing vengeance poured out on one’s enemies.

Not all of American Christianity ascribes to the charts, theories, and timelines of end-times theology, but it’s shaped by the same impulses. American Christianity has come to be defined by who and what it’s against, by legalism and dogmatism that draws lines in the sand and turns unbelievers into enemies. There is a constant sense of persecution and judgment for standing up for “sincerely held beliefs.” And because the goal of American Christianity is getting to heaven, all sorts of responsibilities in the here and now can be ignored. After all, why worry about the world now when God is eventually going to start all over anyway?

That was my faith for years: convinced I needed to be perfect, guilty of not being able to achieve perfection, fearful of hell, judgment, and anybody who was different from me. If someone didn’t look and think and believe exactly the way I did, that person was an enemy or at least Satan’s willing accomplice out to lead me astray; my allies would all look and think and believe the way I did.

End-times theology actually offered a sense of hope and liberation from the fear. Despite being driven by fear itself, it promised me that even if I wasn’t perfect, I could follow signs that would keep me from being left behind or going to hell. When I was raptured, I’d be able to watch from heaven while everyone who ever did me wrong got their just due. For someone desperate to be perfect and desperate not to go to hell, the promise of end-times theology was too intoxicating to resist.