Therapy can help you manage symptoms, but it is Jesus who ultimately heals us.
Mild panic erupted whenthe pilot’s voice suddenly came over the intercom. “We have an engine light on. We’re heading back to Cincinnati. Sorry, folks, but we can’t fly with engine problems.”

The woman behind me began to breathe heavily. “Will we be OK?”

The guy next to me started to curse. How dare the pilot upset his plans?

Looks of worry blanketed most passengers, but I sat there in peace. It was unnatural. I should have been anxious and tense. After all, my oldest brother was killed on an airplane.

Safely back in Cincinnati, we filed off the plane and received our new flight assignments. I was fortunate to be booked on the next flight. After boarding, I settled down next to a tall, expensively dressed man who recognized me from the previous flight.

“Why are you flying to South Bend?” he asked me.

I explained that I was on my way to a Midwestern college where there was grave concern over the growing number of eating disorders reported on campus. I was going to consult with faculty and administration and speak to the students.

After a long, intellectual discussion about eating disorders and psychology, I said to my seat partner: “OK, your turn. What do you do for a living?”

He was a Harvard graduate who headed up an investment-banking firm in New York City that had lost 25 percent of its business since 9/11. His office was located right at Ground Zero, opposite the Twin Towers.

He confessed that after watching the horror and devastation from his office windows, he still suffers night terrors, flashbacks and other symptoms related to post-traumatic stress. He was struggling to find significance in life.

After we had worked through a few symptom-reduction strategies, he stopped. “OK, do you really think a shrink helps? Psychologists were sent in to Ground Zero to help us, but I haven’t found them very helpful.”

I thought about my own experiences with trauma. Though my psychology training had helped me cope with trauma, it hadn’t brought complete healing.

So I leaned over and smiled, “You know how people panicked when the engine light went on during our last flight? I should have panicked too.

“My brother was killed on an airplane, we think by a terrorist’s bomb. The fallout from that experience in my life was tremendous. I learned to manage symptoms related to grief, fear and anxiety, but I was never free from the fallout until my faith entered the picture.”

“Oh, are you religious?” he probed.

“No not really,” I replied. “But I do have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Because of Jesus, I am finally free from the traumatic effects.”

I went on to explain. “Therapy can help you manage symptoms, get you through the day or night, bring relief, help you understand the root of your problems, offer change strategies and even provide helpful tools. In fact, therapy is very helpful, and I am grateful for my training.

“But it is Jesus who ultimately heals and frees us. When He spoke truth to me, when I experienced His love and power, I was no longer in recovery. I was transformed. That’s why I could sit on our earlier flight and not panic. God gave me an overriding sense of peace.

“Yes, I know how to manage anxiety when it hits. I can practice a number of useful techniques that work for the moment. But God brings lasting peace. That’s freedom, not recovery!”

The door of the plane opened. The traveler was contemplative and thanked me for the conversation.

As I walked down the jet way, I thought about how often I had settled for simply managing my emotional pain. Why? Jesus came to set the captive free, to heal the brokenhearted and to open prison doors for those who are bound. It’s time to declare freedom!

Loose those chains that bind you. He has given you what you need: the transforming power of the gospel, His presence, His Word, the Spirit of truth and the Light. Freedom is waiting!

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Linda S. Mintle, Ph.D., is a Virginia-based licensed clinical social worker and author of the Breaking Free series (Charisma House), available at . She welcomes your questions about the tough issues of life at .

A free press is still one of the best protections of freedom in any society.
Despite often legitimate complaints by American Christians about anti-Christian bias in the secular media, the fact remains that even when it is blankly uncomprehending of issues of faith, a free press is still one of the best protections of freedom in any society. When freedom of the press is threatened anywhere, along with freedom of conscience, people’s lives are at risk.

Nowhere can you grasp this more vividly than in Africa, a continent whose peoples have in recent decades been more brutalized by dictatorship, civil war, corruption and disease than anywhere else on earth.

In mid-November in Nairobi, Kenya, we heard heartrending, firsthand stories of this from 40 journalists, all of them Christian, gathered from 11 African nations. The occasion was the African Regional Conference of Gegrapha, the global fellowship of Christians in journalism founded in Washington, D.C., in 1998. Some of those journalists present had been forced to flee their homes and their countries because their reporting antagonized their governments or, as in northern Nigeria, an aggressive and expansionist branch of Islam.

Clayton Peel, former deputy editor of The Chronicle in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, was fired overnight from the pro-government paper after front-paging the story of a mayoral candidate cleared in court of malicious and politically motivated corruption charges. Until he left Zimbabwe he did not know if he would be jailed, or worse.

“There does come a point,” Peel said, “when your Christian conscience provokes you, and in being provoked, you provoke others.”

In Nigeria, which returned to democracy two years ago, the most frightening challenge to Christians and journalists is that of efforts by Muslim Nigerians in the country’s north to suppress both Christianity and press freedom by imposing the sharia, Islamic religious law. Emmanuel Hasan (not his real name), editor of a northern regional newspaper, had to flee for his life after bravely reporting anti-Christian violence by militant Nigerian Muslims in his state.

After arriving in Lagos, Hasan did something radical–he founded a Christian newspaper, The Envoy. He had three goals: to report instances of Christian persecution, to look at news from a Christian perspective and to be frank in reporting when the church itself slipped up.

But Hasan was shocked by unexpected opposition. “We didn’t expect the difficulties to come from the church,” he says.

Hasan says many churches became hostile when his paper pointed out wrong-doing or corruption among them. Despite this, Hasan says, the paper became popular with ordinary people because, in his words, “We stood for the truth.”

Truth also disturbs authoritarian governments because it challenges the legitimacy of their power. A journalist familiar with Egypt said he had been surprised by how much fear there was in the Egyptian media about reporting basic true facts.

“We need to challenge ourselves to tell the truth,” he said, but he added, “We need to understand that it is a real danger to tell the truth.”

All the African reporters were aware of the difficulties of press censorship in many of their countries. Some of them also worried about the insidious threat of self-censorship–holding back truth-telling for fear of government violence or some other backlash.

A reporter for an African government news agency repented in public for having often to “slant” the stories she writes. If a government minister has addressed 25 people at a political meeting, she said, almost in tears, she has to write that there was a “mammoth rally” for the government.

Yet the overall mood of the conference was filled with hope. “For all of us in Africa, we can influence our societies if we see ourselves as Christians,” Hasan commented. New Gegrapha chapters of Christian journalists will be formed in several African countries, and there was a sense of deep commitment to support and pray for one another.

Next stop for Gegrapha will be at the regional level, with conferences in South Asia and Europe. Please pray for financially successful Christians to help us accomplish all this.

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David Aikman, a regular Charisma columnist, is the founder and chairman of Gegrapha, a global fellowship of Christians in journalism (). He can be reached by email at aikmanwriter@.

Our vision should motivate us to attempt something so big we need God to accomplish it.
My mentor, the late Jamie Buckingham, had a sign in a large frame above his desk. It read: “Attempt something so big that unless God intervenes it is bound to fail.” Jamie lived that kind of life.

In the late 1970s, he challenged me to live the same way by asking me a simple question: “What would you attempt for God if you knew you could not fail?”

In his book Where Eagles Soar, Jamie encouraged all believers to develop this type of vision. He wrote: “Most of us dream dreams; however, [we] then put them aside as impossible. Yet God never puts a desire in our heart, or beckons us to walk on water, unless He intends for us to step out on faith and at least make the attempt. Whether we achieve or not is almost immaterial; the passing of the test lies in whether we try, in whether we’re willing to be obedient to the inner call to greatness.”

Having a vision is crucial. We should all ask God to give us a vision that will transform our lives and motivate us to attempt something so big that unless He intervenes it is bound to fail.

Here are some things I learned from Jamie about vision:

When you have a clear vision, you can risk your life for it.
People who run to win are willing to pay the price.
The reason most people quit growing is that they are not willing to pay the price.
Faith equals risk. Without faith it is impossible to please God.
God has big plans for you. Don’t take what God meant for you and ruin it with mediocre living. What are you willing to give up to get what you want?

After we have had God birth a vision in our spirits and have determined that, at all costs, we will implement His vision in our lives, we must decide how we are going to do it. Setting goals helps.

The closest most people get to goal-setting is making a list of New Year’s resolutions. But goals are so much more. They are dreams–with a deadline.

Setting a goal is like focusing sunlight with a magnifying glass. When your
life energy is shining on a pinpoint, you can start a fire. Writing down spiritual, family, professional, self-improvement or fitness goals often will set in motion the habits necessary to achieve them. The mind moves in the direction of its dominant thoughts, and what you measure and monitor improves.

Your goals should not be self-focused or small. Setting a goal to spend time with your children every day or buy a bigger family home is worthwhile but not far-reaching enough for someone who desires to make a difference for the kingdom of God.

Myles Munroe believes that God wants all of us to become people who have plans, or what he calls “documented imaginations.” If we can document an imagination, we’ve developed a plan for action.

How should you start?

Begin with general goals.
Break your general goals down into specific daily tasks.
Set some life goals.
Establish a mission statement.

Patrick Morley, author of The Man in the Mirror, recommends writing a personal mission statement that includes four elements: (1) A life purpose: why you exist; (2) A calling: what you do; (3) A vision or mental picture of what you want to happen; and (4) A mission: how you will go about it.

“A vision is a goal–a big one. Visions are not the work of today or tomorrow or even next month,” Morley says. “Rather, a vision has a longer term.”

What God-inspired goals do you have for your life? What is it you would do if there were no boundaries on your imagination or budget?

If you haven’t had big goals and dreams before now, I pray you will begin to set them and give them deadlines. The first of the year is a good time to make your list.

Keep in mind that when you stand before the Lord He will hold you accountable for the talents and resources He bestowed upon you and the dreams He placed in your heart.

You have nothing to lose by following God’s highest plan for you, and on that day when God says to you, “Well done, good and faithful servant,” you will know that He is pleased with what you accomplished for Him.

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Stephen Strang is the founder and publisher of Charisma.

Our focus must be on the development of character and skills–not on titles and status!

I was thinking the other morning about the many different hats I wear. I realized, to my dismay, that I have at least five different titles–Reverend, Doctor, Pastor, Senior Overseer, Bishop. Are all of these labels necessary? Are titles being misused in the church?

When I was growing up during the 1960s, my parents were extremely concerned about my respect for authority. I could not refer to the milkman as, simply, the milkman. If I didn’t know his name, then he was Mr. Milkman. I was taught to reverence all schoolteachers, and had I addressed a police officer as anything other than Officer or, you guessed it, Mr. Policeman, my wise mother would have made sure I lived to regret it.

In today’s world, this approach seems extreme, but my parents were smart enough to know that a young man who grows up ignorant of the boundaries separating him from those in authority could be headed for trouble. At the very least, remembering a person’s station in life may prevent us from taking for granted those whom God has placed around us in positions of leadership.

Unfortunately, in the church today titles often are used to evoke status and position, while the leaders bearing these titles fail to inspire genuine respect. You may refer to your pastor using his or her title or first name, but the issue is whether or not you earnestly respect and honor the leader God has placed in your life.

Titles do not produce leaders. My friend John Maxwell teaches that people do not follow titles–they follow leaders. If this is true, then why do some leaders seem consumed with their titles? I become amused when people introduce themselves to me as Dr. or Rev. So-and-So, and I wonder why these individuals feel the need to present titles as part of their identity.

Leaders are developed through God’s process. No prefix on a person’s name will transform him or her into the leader he or she is called to be. The body of Christ needs leaders now more than ever, but real leaders do not need titles to lead. Our focus must be on the development of character and skills–not on titles and status!

Titles alone do not produce respect. People inspire respect because of who they are, not what they are called. Growing up, I thought highly of my church leaders; they were people of integrity. I met many other titled Christians later in life who lacked the character and divine empowerment necessary to merit the same level of regard. If a leader is authentic, then he or she does not need to wield a title to demand respect–it will be given willingly by those whose hearts are open.

Titles should connect, not distance. Many of our church members have been with me since long before I became the overseer of other churches. I find it humorous when these members address me as “Pastor” and then apologize because they didn’t call me “Bishop.” The truth is, I just want to connect with the people I lead.

Some members love the term “Bishop” and bristle at my being called anything else. They see me as a pastor of pastors and connect with my heart to serve pastors around the world. If still others find comfort in calling me “Reverend,” then so be it. What really matters is that the people I lead connect with the vision God has placed in my heart.

My title does not define me–it is a tool with which to link people to my call. My wife calls me “Sweetheart” because she expects me to love her. She is connecting with my call!

As a believer, you have a tremendous opportunity to encourage those who lead you in the local church. Whether you call your pastor Bob, Pastor Bob, Bishop Bob or Dr. Bob, you can purpose in your heart to honor and respect your leader. Let your leader know that you appreciate his or her ministry.

Don’t fall into the current trend of cynicism and criticism. Look beyond the title and see the man or woman who demonstrates the grace and skill to lead. When you find a leader of such caliber, respect and cherish that person–title or no title–for you have found a rare treasure.

B. Courtney McBath () is senior pastor of Calvary Revival Church in Norfolk, Virginia, and senior overseer of Calvary Alliance, a global network of churches. He is the author of Maximize Your Marriage (Creation House Press), which is available at .

Controversy erupted after an evangelical group endorsed the publisher of Witness Lee’s writings
A controversial group known as the Local Church–which has been accused of being a cult in past decades–has been endorsed by the nation’s most influential Christian publisher’s association. The move has opened up a new debate about the beliefs of the group and one of its founders, Witness Lee.

The group’s publishing arm, Living Stream Ministry (LSM) of Anaheim, Calif., distributes books written by Lee, who died in 1997. After years of complaints about its questionable doctrines, LSM was granted membership in the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association (ECPA), association President Doug Ross confirmed in November.

As part of that process, LSM signed the ECPA’s statement of faith, Ross said. LSM touts this move as more proof that Lee’s doctrines are sound and that critics and cult-watchers who have attacked Lee’s works for years are either misinformed or are jealous of the Local Church’s growth. LSM is a longtime member of the Christian Booksellers Association as well.

The Local Church now has more than 3,000 congregations worldwide and more than 250,000 members, with about 250 churches and 25,000 members in the United States and Canada, an LSM spokesman said.

Critics say Living Stream has never refuted Lee’s questionable definition of the Trinity, which some say is “modalism” –a doctrine that caused Oneness Pentecostals to split from the Assemblies of God in the early 1900s. Nor has Living Stream refuted Lee’s own statements about the Local Church being the one true church, critics say.

LSM denies belief in modalism, claims belief in the widely accepted orthodox Trinity doctrine and denies that the Local Church does not recognize other churches or denominations as legitimate members of the body of Christ, spokesperson Chris Wilde told Charisma.

“Modalism says that the Father became the Son and ceased to be the Father, and that the Spirit became the Son and ceased to be the Spirit. We do not teach that. That is heresy,” Wilde said.

Wilde also denied that the Local Church’s habit of naming local congregations after the city of its location, such as ‘The Local Church of Los Angeles,’ translates as a declaration that the Local Church is the only true church in that city, as critics charge. The term “Local Church” is still used because it is closely tied to the biblical admonition for believers to work in unity and avoid divisions, Wilde said.

Watchman Nee (1903-1972), a Chinese evangelist and Lee’s mentor, founded the Local Church in 1927 in Shanghai because he believed that denominational competition is unbiblical, according to Religions of the World: A Comprehensive Encyclopedia of Beliefs and Practices. In mainstream circles, Nee’s works are more widely accepted as doctrinally sound than Lee’s.

Lee joined the Local Church movement in the 1930s and became a close associate of Nee’s. Nee sent Lee to Taiwan in 1948, where nationalist forces had gathered while communists took over the mainland. The communists arrested Nee in 1952 and eventually sent him to prison for the remainder of his life.
Lee brought the Local Church movement to the United States in the 1960s.

Lee’s interpretation of this one-church theory has drawn criticism from observers for years because Lee said in Living Stream publications that other churches are not ordained of God.

“Consider the situation in Orange County [Calif.],” Lee wrote in Young People’s Training, a Living Stream publication. “Anaheim is famous for three things–for schools, parks and ‘churches.’ In the eyes of God, these are not churches, but confusions, fornications.”

ECPA’s Ross said his staff met with LSM officials on several occasions because they knew that “there are people who would be carrying ideas about Living Stream that are carry-overs from days gone by. They eagerly signed our statement of faith and answered all of our questions satisfactorily.”

Many critics of LSM have never sat down with LSM to discuss the concerns, Ross added, and urged anyone to visit the LSM-sponsored Web site at to read LSM’s responses to the doctrinal challenges it has faced.

But critics of Lee’s teachings dismiss LSM’s ECPA membership as any sort of relief over the controversy surrounding Lee.

“It means very little that Living Stream Ministries has signed the ECPA’s statement of faith,” said investigative journalist, author and cult-watcher Richard Abanes. “Many doctrinally aberrant organizations could do the same thing. The [ECPA faith] statement only deals in general terms using language that such organizations could agree to, given how they radically redefine doctrinal terms.

“It is true–I have not sat down and met with [LSM], but I have read a plethora of material they have written,” Abanes said. “I haven’t met Billy Graham either, but I certainly know what he believes.”

Abanes and doctrinal watchdogs such as Watchman Fellowship said they are alarmed that LSM has only defended Lee’s teachings and never admitted to any error. And they said LSM has a reputation for trying to silence their critics with legal action, another accusation Wilde denied.

“What is true is that if something is coming into print that we believe is in complete disharmony with the truth, we make every admonition according to the Scriptures to meet with our brothers to overcome misunderstandings,” Wilde said. “[Suing] is never our first response or our desire.”

Watchman Fellowship President James K. Walker disagreed with Wilde’s assessment.

“Evangelicals should be very cautious about accepting Living Stream Ministry or the Local Church of Witness Lee as one of us,” Walker said. “What Lee meant by ‘Trinity’ often seems contradictory. He also taught, ‘The Father, the Son and the Spirit are not three separate persons or three Gods; they are one God, one reality, one person.'”

Walker quoted Lee’s own words on denominations: “‘When we were in denominations, we were blind. I do not believe that any dear Christians who have really received sight from the Lord could still remain in denominations.'”

And on LSM’s alleged propensity for legal threats against critics, Walker said: “If the Local Church truly sees evangelical Christians as brothers, it is violating biblical prohibition against suing brothers. It would seem that either the Local Church has no regard for 1 Corinthians 6, or they don’t regard evangelical Christians as their brothers.”

Wilde said LSM greatly desires an open dialogue with evangelicals in order to further the work of Nee and Lee.

“There is a resurgence in the Watchman Nee ministry today because it really calls believers into a deeper experience of Christ,” he said. “We are trying to break this [public image] boundary, no question about it.”
Billy Bruce

Orthodox Jewish leaders in Israel are seeking to stop the growth of a Messianic congregation by opposing building permits the congregation needs to expand its facilities. After losing initial court rulings, the leaders have appealed the legal battle to the Israeli Supreme Court to stop construction by the Grace and Truth Christian Congregation near Tel Aviv.

“We’re in growing pains, and we need to do something urgently,” explained Grace and Truth’s pastor, Baruch Maoz.

When his congregation bought property and began building, an Orthodox group known as Yad Le’achim took the church to court on two counts. Known for its radical opposition to Christians’ witnessing to Jews, Yad Le’achim lost on both counts. In the ruling, the judge castigated the group for religious persecution of Grace and Truth, Maoz said.

But the Orthodox group hired one of Israel’s most controversial lawyers to appeal the ruling to the high court. Maoz said the court should rule on the matter in early 2003.

If Yad Le’achim cannot win the legal battle, they may win by driving legal costs high enough to stop construction of the new facility. Already, Grace and Truth has incurred $45,000 in legal fees–money that should have gone to the new building, Maoz said.

The court’s decision will be an important one, Maoz said, because it will set a legal precedent on the issue of religious persecution. Maoz believes Jewish law should protect all Israeli citizens from such persecution, whether they are Orthodox Jews or Messianic Jews. Despite the opposition by Yad Le’achim, there is surprisingly little religious persecution in Israel against Christians, said Maoz, a Boston-born immigrant to Israel.

Yad Le’achim opposes Grace and Truth’s building project because they see it as a precedent for other evangelical ministries, Maoz said. But he noted that legal efforts to ban evangelism always end in defeat.

“We are not intimidated,” the pastor said. “God will assist us. He will see us through our present trials.”
Richard Daigle in Tel Aviv, Israel

The young preacher says he wants to set the record straight about an offense he committed at age 14, before his conversion
Canadian evangelist Todd Bentley knows well the power of a testimony to convince the lost that no one is too far gone to find healing in Christ. Recently, he has also learned that when the secular media digs into one’s testimony, confession may not be so good for the soul.

In a lengthy feature article published in the September 2002 issue of Charisma, Bentley, 26, acknowledged that at age 14, as a juvenile, he had been arrested for assault. A March 2001 story about him that was published in The Report–a secular, conservative political magazine published in British Columbia and Alberta, Canada–offered a similar report.

But The Report story backfired when the mother of the victim of the assault read the article and informed the magazine that Bentley’s assault had been sexual and that he had molested her son, also a minor, at the time. Bentley served several months in jail for the crime, and five years afterward he gave his life to Christ. Today his crusades around the world are producing reports of healing miracles and thousands of salvations.

The Report writer who filed the original story about Bentley’s ministry called him back to verify the nature of the crime. As a juvenile offender, Bentley’s record was protected from public disclosure, and he said he had no idea The Report would then turn around and publish his acknowledgement of the crime.

“[The reporter] didn’t tell me he was doing a follow-up story,” Bentley told Charisma. “He was just friendly and told me what the mother had said, and I admitted to him in what I thought were off-the-record comments that it was true, but that it happened years ago and I had since been changed by the gospel.”

Bentley openly acknowledges the rougher parts of his juvenile past when he preaches in public, including his near-fatal drug overdoses, criminal burglaries, physical abuse of his mother and several stints in prison. But he said he has never talked openly about the sexual assault because of the stigma the crime carries and what he says is “the inability of Christians to forgive certain sins.”

His advisers, who include several pastors and counselors, have advised him to refrain from talking publicly about the sexual crime for the same reasons.

Bentley did publicly acknowledge the sexual assault during the summer of 2001 while leading a conference and crusade in Kewlona, British Columbia. He had received the support of the New Life Vineyard church in Kewlona to use their facilities for the events, and organizers had installed posters advertising the event around town.

The family of the assault victim had moved to Kewlona, and when they saw the posters with Bentley’s name, they contacted local media. Bentley decided to address the local outcry by going on the 6 p.m. local TV-news broadcast. He admitted the crime on-air, asked for forgiveness, told viewers how ashamed he was, and how he was transformed five years after the incident by the gospel’s power.

“From that incident up to this article in The Report, our ministry has not had one complaint about this revelation from my past,” Bentley told Charisma. “The church in Kewlona stood behind me and continued to allow me to use their facilities to finish the conference. The protests stopped after I went on TV, and they aired that broadcast two or three times.”

Bentley, who is now married and has children of his own, said he has feared Christians would be afraid to leave their children around him if the
juvenile sex-offense were known. He says he will report on the crime in a book he is writing that is expected to release this year.

Two ministers who provide pastoral covering for Bentley told Charisma they have full confidence that God has forgiven him for his juvenile crimes and that he is in no way susceptible to repeat offenses of that nature.

“Todd is in good standing with us, and we believe him most definitely to be restored,” Pat Cocking said. “There has been no sign at all of any questionable behavior.”

Bobby Conner of Demonstration of God’s Power Ministries in Moravian Falls, N.C., echoed Cocking’s sentiments.

“I do serve on Todd’s watch-care group and minister with him several times a year,” Conner said. “I know that he is a faithful young man. The anointing on his life is awesome. I feel he has been up-front with me and the watch-care group about his life before Christ. It seems well to move on now and not to continue to open what God has forgiven and covered.”
Billy Bruce

Pageant winner Erika Harold, a Pentecostal, says opposition to her stand won’t stop her from speaking her mind
Reigning Miss America Erika Harold, a Pentecostal Christian, has a message for young people: The best sex happens if you wait until marriage. Her message of abstinence, however, has been met with opposition by at least one official associated with her new position.

Harold, a member of an Assemblies of God church, said the negative reaction from a person she described as being in the organization but not on the Miss America staff will not keep her from speaking her mind on the subject.

“I find this disturbing because abstinence is the only way to keep young people safe,” she told Charisma.

Harold spoke about premarital chastity for years as she traveled in Illinois with the Chicago-based nonprofit group Project Reality, well before winning the Miss Illinois title.

“Hopefully, during the course of the year they will see the benefit there is to share this type of message with young people,” she said. Her choice to abstain from sex until marriage has been instrumental in her success. And she said kids who hear her message are “unbelievably receptive.”

“I’m really trying to make the idea of abstinence connect with freedom, with power and with self-respect because the tendency is to think of abstinence as something very passive. It has freed me to achieve many of my goals,” she said.

The wide variety of social gatherings she is required to speak for means that she cannot always acknowledge the Lord verbally, Harold said. But she’s very aware that God is using her at all times in one of the highest-profile roles in America.

Often, Harold said, people will ask if she is a Christian, even if she hasn’t said anything about God. She knows God has a purpose in her winning this honor, and she trusts Him to fulfill it.

“One of the lessons I’ve learned in life is to not figure out what God is doing but just be obedient and do it,” she said. Harold said she simply tries to communicate her authentic feelings with the many audiences she addresses.

Harold and her family attend Urbana Assembly of God in Urbana, Ill., a church with a multicultural appeal. About 50 percent of the congregation is white, one-quarter is African American or African, and the rest are Hispanic, Asian or of other ethnic origins.

Harold’s family fits right in. Her father, Bob, is of Greek, German, Welsh and English descent. Her mother, Donna, is African American, Cherokee, Choctaw and Russian.

Bob Harold said he is impressed with his daughter’s strong faith and gifted intellectual abilities–she has deferred a Harvard Law School scholarship to serve as Miss America. “She’s a person who can articulate the truth in a passionate way that can change lives,” he said of his daughter’s abstinence platform.

When Harold was in the ninth grade, she suffered harassment by a few boys at the school that was so severe that today she can speak with authority about the problem of bullying. “God gave her the ability to forgive those people and move on,” her father said.

Urbana Assembly of God pastor Gary Grogan describes Harold’s relationship with God as authentic. “Her title is God’s way to spread the message of abstinence,” he said. “Her real destiny is to make an impact on the youth of America.”

Harold challenges Christian youth to go for God’s dream in their lives. “God will use willing hearts and spirits,” she said.
Richard Daigle

He instructs leaders to perform ‘for an audience of one’
Worship seminars may be an effective tool for improving corporate praise in local churches, but well-known worship leader Ron Kenoly likes to teach worship teams how to lead the individual congregant into a more personal worship experience.

How? Kenoly takes the emphasis off of music for the masses and places it on a message for an audience of one.

“I’ve been to so many seminars where people leave with head knowledge, but their heart hasn’t been ministered to,” said Kenoly, a renowned songwriter and recording artist. “They go away with notebooks of information but are broken inside.”

His firsthand knowledge of the shortcomings of such seminars led him to start the Academy of Praise, a mentoring program for worship leaders and others in Christian music. Through one-week seminars held yearly in his hometown of Orlando, Fla., Kenoly attempts to impart the musical style that he has demonstrated since the mid-1980s.

With two conferences under his belt, Kenoly is planning the third for May 19-23. The February 2002 conference brought 100 people from 12 countries.

Kenoly, who enlisted help in earlier seminars from fellow worship leader Don Moen, pastor Sharon Daugherty and pianist Adlan Cruz, will again be joined by his personal mentor, Bahamian pastor and author Myles Munroe, for the upcoming seminar. The small number of attendees allows Kenoly to engage in one-on-one sessions crucial to the program’s success.

“I make myself available to 100 people to sit down and counsel them on whatever issues they might be going through,” Kenoly said. “There are some leaders with questions that they can’t ask publicly. Out of personal integrity they can’t stand up and say, ‘My pastor does this, and I hate it.'”

Kenoly believes people look to mirror someone who has done what they’re trying to do.

“It’s not like they’re putting something on me that I’ve never dealt with. I’m 57 years old, and I’ve dealt with health issues, family issues, financial issues and relationship issues, and God has given me victory over them. I can give them a solution that works–praying, fasting, forgiving and submitting to authority,” the singer said.

In addition to the individual sessions, the academy includes nighttime worship services and day sessions on topics such as principles of worship, patterns of worship, power of worship and practicals of worship.

The academy ends with personal prayer, laying on of hands and the presentation of certificates of completion. “So many have never been endorsed by their pastor,” Kenoly said. “Worship leaders need validation and affirmation.”

According to Kenoly, worship leaders often are hired because they have a good voice, but they may not be qualified to deal with the equally important areas of administration, human interaction, music arrangement and Bible knowledge.

“It’s good to know all about the tabernacle of Moses and how the positions of the tribes were located, but when John is not getting along with Karen, you’ve got to step in and deal with that.”

Some pastors don’t understand the importance people place on worship, he noted. Many seekers select churches based solely on that element.

“Music has a way of breaking the heaviness that’s over people’s lives. When Moses brought the children of Israel across the Red Sea he didn’t preach to them, pray for them or prophesy over them. The first thing he did was write a song.”

Although the seminars currently are held once a year, Kenoly’s goal is to offer the courses in three-month terms. He also plans to take the academy to different countries starting with Brazil, England, the Philippines and South Africa in 2003.

The cost to attend the academy is approximately $200, and a pastoral recommendation is required. For information call (888) PRAISES.
Rhonda Sholar

From matriarch Violet, 77, to grandson Patrick, 28, three generations are taking the gospel to the city
Amid political upheaval, racial tension and surging crime in Oakland, Calif., Violet Kiteley, son David, and grandchildren Patrick and Melinda have lived, ministered and thrived, staking a spiritual claim in one of America’s toughest cities.

The Kiteleys’ unorthodox approach to sharing the gospel not only has touched virtually every corner of the neighborhood where their Shiloh Christian Fellowship is located, but it also has extended to 60 nations.

Violet Kiteley, now 77, was a ministry pioneer long before she arrived in Oakland, which is known for having one of America’s most dangerous and poorest inner cities. She was one of the first prominent female preachers of the 20th century and a bellwether of Pentecostal revival in the Latter Rain movement that produced preachers William Branham and Oral Roberts.

She prayed to accept Christ as her Savior at age 6. As a teen she received a prophecy given through Aimee Semple McPherson. “She put her hand on my head and said that the mantle of God was on [me] and I would minister around the world,” Kiteley recalled.

During World War II, many male pastors were drafted into military service. To fill the need in the Assemblies of God in her native British Columbia, Kiteley–who had taught Sunday school–became a pulpit preacher.

Ministry for her could have had an early end. On July 13, 1945, her husband of less than a year was killed in an airplane crash. At the time, she was pregnant. David was born in October of that year, but Kiteley remained hospitalized for a time and could not walk for 13 months.

In 1965, Violet and David moved to Oakland to plant a church. In the midst of the Civil Rights Movement and in the hometown of the militant Black Panthers, the mother-and-son ministry team started Shiloh as a Bible study in the living room of an African American family–then expanded it into a Bible school. Today the independent Pentecostal church has about 2,000 members, and the school has satellite campuses in six countries.

“Our mission is restoration,” said Violet, who now heads the Bible school. “We want to see racial, economic and gender reconciliation.”

When the Kiteleys learned that a nearby street was a haven for drug trafficking, they instituted block parties and held a health fair. Crime plummeted on that street and others.

In 1988, Shiloh was honored for its role by then-California Gov. George Deukmejian and by the National Crime Prevention Council. Subsequently, Shiloh has partnered with the Oakland Police Department on many projects, including Christmas dinners and fingerprinting children for identification.

David Kiteley, who now serves as senior pastor, leads a mid-week Bible study that is attended by about 75 police officers. In the 1960s, he marched with the Civil Rights protesters, and for most of his ministry years the city has been predominantly African American.

However, that has started to change. The African American population in Oakland has dipped from 65 percent to 41 percent. New arrivals come from Asia, Latin America and the South Pacific.

“When the demographics change,” David said, “we have to change our ministry. We used to have just Black History Day. Now we have an Asian day and a Hispanic day. Our people have to be culturally aware.”

Today, the church is 35 percent African American, 30 percent Caucasian, 15 percent Hispanic, 10 percent African national, and 10 percent Asian and Pacific Islander.

“It is not enough to just get different races to come to church together on Sunday,” David said. “We are not integrated until we have shared a meal together, been in each other’s homes and heard each other’s stories.”

David’s son Patrick, 28, was raised in this cross-cultural environment. The younger Kiteley leads the Saturday night youth-and-college service at Shiloh and is on course to become senior pastor when his father steps aside.

Patrick Kiteley helps facilitate Bible studies for several hundred students at the University of California at Berkeley and at California State University at Hayward. He also served on the advisory board for The Call DC.
Steven Lawson in Oakland, Calif.