Snake-handling Pentecostals may be on the fringe of American religious culture, but a new opera brings their exuberant worship and rockabilly-inspired music to center stage this week.

“Taking Up Serpents,” a 60-minute work by composer Kamala Sankaram and librettist Jerre Dye, debuted Jan. 11 and 13 at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.

Set in Gulf Shores, Ala., the opera tells the story of Kayla, a 25-year-old clerk in a convenience store whose father runs a serpent-handling church. Washington National Opera soprano Alexandria Shiner plays the lead role. Timothy J. Bruno plays her father, the pastor of a Pentecostal congregation called the “Church of the Lord Jesus Christ With Signs Foretold.”

The “signs” referred to in the church’s name come from Mark 16:17-18, which claims believers can speak in tongues, survive a dose of poison or a bite from a venomous snake, heal the sick and cast out demons. Most Pentecostal churches accept the first, fourth and fifth signs as normative. But only about 100 U.S. congregations, mainly in Appalachia, believe that church services should also include snake handling and the quaffing of strychnine and similar poisonous substances.

The opera traces Kayla’s journey after she learns her father is dying of a rattlesnake bite in a Birmingham hospital. Her mother wants her to come home. As she travels there, Kayla reminisces over her childhood and frayed relationships with her family. She visits her father in the hospital, then makes her way to his church.

There won’t be any live snakes onstage, but during the final aria, Kayla reaches into a snake box (typically a flat wooden box with a Plexiglas cover) to pick up a serpent.

“She does choose to handle at the end,” said Dye, who grew up Pentecostal and embraced “gifts” of the Holy Spirit such as speaking in tongues. Although his family didn’t frequent serpent-handling churches, he knew they existed nearby.

“When I grew up, snake handling was considered the line in the sand for that culture,” he said. “The most theatrical charismatics would absolutely distance themselves from snake handling. They would say, ‘We don’t handle snakes, but we know people who do.'”

The opera was inspired by Dye’s upbringing and the 1995 book “Salvation on Sand Mountain,” which features serpent handlers in Alabama’s rural northeast. He calls serpent handlers one of the great hidden stories of the South. Their church services, he said, are filled with built-in drama.

“Possessing an electric testimony is built into the culture,” he said. “They have to talk about how God found them. They call themselves godly and yet their lives are very messy.”

Dye was also impressed with the music of serpent handlers, which is often improvised and plays a major role in church services. Congregants will sing and dance for hours during worship.

“There’s a jangly, gorgeous lopsided sound to their music. It’s like Johnny Cash crashes into something,” Dye said. “They’re all very self-taught and they use piano, tambourine, drums, whatever instruments are available.”

Dye has left the beliefs of his childhood behind. Theater, he said, has taken the place of religion in his heart. Still, there are the memories.

“I try to tell this human story of this search, this longing,” he said.

The use of snakes in worship services is a solely American phenomenon, beginning around 1910 after George Hensley, a preacher from Chattanooga, Tenn., began teaching that the Mark 16 verses mandated the practice. The practice spread to the point that several states in the region outlawed serpent handling because of the many deaths that resulted.

About 100 people have died of snake bite or poison intake during such services over the last century. One of the most recent deaths occurred Feb. 15, 2014. The Rev. Jamie Coots, 42, the co-star of “Snake Salvation,” a 2013 reality show on serpent handling aired by the National Geographic Channel, was fatally bitten while holding three rattlesnakes at a church service in Middlesboro, Ky.

Serpent handling is not a practice associated with the arts world, as it’s typically represented in documentaries or photo exhibits. As for fiction, Ralph Hood, a psychology professor at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga who’s considered the world expert on the practice, said there had been a few novels about the snake handlers, although “none of any real merit,” he added.

Robert Ainsley, director of the American Opera Initiative program sponsoring “Taking Up Serpents,” said religion is not an alien theme for opera.

“‘Samson and Delilah’ have huge elements of that,” he said. “This opera is more about a dysfunctional family than about serpent handling, but religion is fundamental to the plot. Faith is a constant and a given and it flows in some form through everyone’s life. I think that (Dye) has nailed that fact.”

The performance, which has a cast of five (playing multiple characters) and a 13-piece orchestra, heads up a quartet of short operas sponsored by the American Opera Initiative Festival. The festival, which seeks to bring new talent for the opera stage, commissions pieces that reflect American society.

Sankaram, the composer, had worked with music in Episcopal and Catholic settings but wasn’t familiar with immersive music that dominates in Appalachia. Because the freewheeling rockabilly style of serpent-handling churches was foreign to her, she watched a lot of videos to get a feel for the four- to five-hour services. The music typically includes bluesy keyboards, electric guitars, drums and tambourines.

It took her five months to come up with a score for a wind quintet, string quintet, piano, percussion and guitar that mixes a contemporary Christian style with shape notes, a type of singing that’s popular in the Great Smoky Mountain region of Appalachia.

“I wanted something in stark contrast to the classical vibrato style of singing,” she said. “It was difficult. I am not from the South. I am from California. While I have friends who are Pentecostal there, this was not the same at all.”

Because of union regulations, the Kennedy Center performances will not be broadcast.

Its creators hope to restage it somewhere closer to the culture, such as Memphis or Nashville, Tenn. Dye believes this first-of-its-kind opera is a story waiting to be told about a group often mocked for its beliefs.

“‘Taking Up Serpents’ was written to honor the spirit of this ecstatic, religious universe and the extraordinary people who inhabit it,” he said. “It was also written to lift the veil a little and serve up some modern-day ecclesiastical redemption.” {eoa}

© 2019 Religion News Service. All rights reserved.

In Disney’s new film Prince Caspian, C.S. Lewis’ unique vision of Christian redemption comes alive on the screen.
A new Chronicles of Narnia tale comes to the screen May 16, starring the same quartet of actors and actresses who played the Pevensie children in the smash 2005 hit The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. One of Disney’s most successful live-action films ever, Lion grossed $742 million worldwide.

Next comes Prince Caspian, which introduces a new character: 26-year-old actor Ben Barnes as the teenage prince.

The book Prince Caspian, first published in 1951, is the second one C.S. Lewis wrote in the Chronicles of Narnia series, but it’s fourth chronologically in a timeline that begins with Narnia’s creation in The Magician’s Nephew and ends with its demise in The Last Battle.

Prince Caspian is a more ambiguous and thoughtful work, and its main theme, according to a 1961 letter penned by Lewis, is “restoration of the true religion after corruption.” Trailers from the movie indicate the tale will be far darker than Lion.
“It is a horror story in which the main motifs are dehumanization, bondage,
tyranny, terror to the good accompanied by elevation of evil and desecration of nature,” says Wheaton College professor Leland Ryken, co-author of the just-released A Reader’s Guide to Caspian. “Most of all, it’s hatred of Aslan.”

As in Lion, the Pevensies are magically transported to Narnia by the blowing of a magic horn by Prince Caspian, the teenage heir to the throne of Narnia. Whereas the children have aged only one year, 1,300 years have passed in Narnian time.

Wilderness has overtaken the castle of Cair Paravel, ancient seat of Narnian royalty. Human society on this flat planet has forgotten the era when Aslan, the Christ-like ruler of Narnia, once walked in their midst and animals could converse like humans.

An alien race, the Telmarines, ruled by the evil King Miraz, now occupies the land. The talking animals have been killed or driven underground, and talk of their existence is forbidden.

“King Miraz is trying to suppress any recollection of the old things,” says Stanley Mattson, president of the C.S. Lewis Foundation in Redlands, California. “For Lewis, the older things were, the more proven they are, the more tested they are. Miraz is the innovator. He is building a new social order that centers on himself.”

Caspian, the nephew of Miraz, grows up in this atmosphere and only learns the truth through his tutor, Dr. Cornelius, a dwarf. Plans are for Caspian to succeed Miraz—until one night when Miraz’s queen bears him an heir.

This event puts Caspian’s life in jeopardy, as Miraz wants his own son to have the throne. Caspian flees Miraz’s castle into the forest and providentially encounters the talking animals.

“The ruling elite had banished belief in Aslan, calling it fables and lies similar to how Western civilization has crossed out its Christian heritage, forgetting its core values,” says Devin Brown, author of the new book Inside Prince Caspian: A Guide to Exploring the Return to Narnia. “Things are more complicated, and issues are not as cut and dried—nor as simple as they were in the first book. King Miraz has drained all the enchantment from Narnia.

“C.S. Lewis wanted to mirror the modern world a little bit, as it too is disenchanted. At least the White Witch [in Lion] was magical. The usurper here [King Miraz] is a two-bit despot.”

When Caspian tries to marshal an army against Miraz, they are outnumbered. When presented a magical horn dating back to the golden days of Narnia, he blows it, hoping that somehow the four children will appear in their past roles as kings and queens of Narnia. He gets his wish, as at the end of the book Miraz is confronted by King Peter, who challenges Miraz to a duel to the death.

“In Prince Caspian, the leaders in the cosmic spiritual battle are Aslan and Miraz,” Ryken says. “The story does not give us a single combat comparable to Aslan and the White Witch in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

“Instead, in Prince Caspian, the battle is waged between followers of Aslan and Miraz. At key points, the struggle is not cosmic but unfolds on an inner stage of the individual human soul.”

The children’s part of the story unfolds with Peter and his siblings trying to make sense of why they have been transported back to Narnia. After they find themselves at a deserted Cair Paravel, they come upon Trumpkin, a dwarf sent by Prince Caspian. Relying on their sketchy memory of Narnian geography, the children strike out through the forest in what they hope will be only a two-day journey to the prince’s side.

When they get lost, Lucy, the youngest and most spiritually astute of the children, sees Aslan motioning to them to change direction—but the others don’t believe her. The next day they are even more lost.

Then occurs the most magical scene in the book: Aslan’s midnight encounter with Lucy. “Aslan,” says Lucy in one of the book’s most famous quotes, “you’re bigger.”
“That is because you’re older, little one,” he answers. “Every year you grow, you will find me bigger.”

Emily Wert, a Presbyterian from Atlanta who won an “ultimate fan of Narnia” contest sponsored by Disney, got to watch this scene being filmed on an elaborate indoor set in Prague.

“Lucy was complaining about how the insects in the grass were freaking her out,” she said, referring to actress Georgie Henley, 12. “The sets there were just amazing: very Tolkienesque.”

At this point, Aslan orders Lucy to rouse her siblings to follow him on a nighttime walk in the opposite direction. Reluctantly, Lucy does so, but no one believes her, as only she can see Aslan standing off in the woods, waiting for them.

Finally her brother Edmund, remembering how right Lucy was—and how wrong he was—during the Lion adventure, admonishes the group to follow her through the moonlit woods. As the night wears on, Aslan becomes more and more visible to the rest of the children. Just before dawn, near the encampment of the besieged Caspian, he appears to them all, building up Lucy, Peter and Edmund for their efforts but admonishing Trumpkin and Susan for their lack of faith.

Art Lindsley, a senior fellow at the C.S. Lewis Institute in Springfield, Virginia, notes that Prince Caspian details incremental changes in the children’s characters. Despite lapses in judgment, Peter continues to make headway in his leadership role; Edmund continues to grow in the humility he learned in Lion; and Lucy grows in holiness and purity.

But Susan has grown more fearful and faithless. Several incidents foreshadow her eventual apostasy as she will continue to veer off track even more in the following book, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. In The Last Battle, she alone misses out on attaining heaven.

“The theme here is faith and trust,” Lindsley says. “You have various levels of people in Caspian—those who believe from the beginning, like Lucy, and those who don’t believe, like Miraz.

“Peter and the other children are at varying levels as they discover various things about themselves. Trumpkin is a ‘Doubting Thomas.’ He doesn’t believe in Aslan until he sees.”

Like several other scholars interviewed, Lindsley said Caspian was his least favorite book of the series. But he has learned to value its qualities.

“Now as I’ve really studied it,” he says, “I see a lot of depth and richness there. The theme is the return to true faith, the reformation of Narnia.”

One of the strangest episodes in the book comes after Aslan’s meeting with Trumpkin and the children. The boys and the dwarf are sent off to help Caspian.

The girls go with Aslan on a spree through Narnia accompanied by Bacchus, the Roman god of wine and orgies.

The inclusion of a mythic god of the vine and mystic ecstasy is a strange one for a children’s tale but not out of character for Lewis, Lindsley explains.

“To Lewis, the old myths are subservient to Christ or Aslan,” he says. “One subtheme of this book is ‘celebration,’ and one of the things Lewis loved was dancing and great feasts. Here, Bacchus is tamed by Aslan, which goes to say, you can have passion without excess.”

Ryken and co-author Marjorie Lamp Mead tackled this question in their book.

“Lewis was a specialist in Renaissance literature, and for Renaissance authors and readers, the mythological characters and stories of the past were old forms of loveliness that appealed to their imaginations,” they wrote. “The fact that Lewis put Bacchus into Aslan’s celebratory march shows that Lewis intended to Christianize this pagan god, making him respectable rather than debauched.

“At his most respectable, Bacchus came to represent liberation, nature, enthusiasm and celebration. It is also possible that Lewis intended to assert by narrative means that Aslan can redeem even the wildest impulses.”

The time frame of Prince Caspian is the shortest of the Narnia books. The action takes place in one week, which allows the Pevensie children to briefly resume their roles as kings and queens in order to defeat Miraz and restore Caspian to the throne. Finally, when the prince meets Aslan, the lion reveals that Caspian’s ancestors too once came from Earth.

“You come of the Lord Adam and Lady Eve,” Aslan says in another of the book’s best quotes. “And that is both honor enough to erect the head of the poorest beggar and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the greatest emperor on earth.”

“The themes are less overt, but more like the average Christian life,” says Brown, an English professor at Asbury College in Wilmore, Kentucky. “Caspian is no one’s favorite book, and it’s the most underrated of the seven books.

“But on a day-to-day basis, we are dealing with people like Miraz and wondering on a day-to-day basis what to do. Also, the children are being asked to do more, and Aslan does less. Christ seems to want us to be His hands and feet in the world and helping out instead of being helped.

“The biblical parallels are not as clear in Prince Caspian, but the thread that runs through Caspian and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is that the selfish life leads ultimately to destruction. But the virtuous life lived for others is quite an adventure.”

Despite the subtleties, Ted Baehr, publisher of Movie Guide and , predicts the film will be another box-office winner in contrast to The Golden Compass, an anti-Narnia book-turned-movie by Philip Pullman released late last year. Compass, a fantasy that glorified adolescent rebellion and encouraged children to get in touch with their inner “daemon,” bombed at the box office, earning $68.4 million domestically. It pulled in $245.7 million overseas, but its $314.1 million total was still below projections.

“Every year, movies with good triumphing over evil win at the box office,” Baehr says. “The average person has a tough life, and they want good to triumph over evil. The top 25 films where good triumphs over evil average $182 million in profits, and those that mention Jesus average $200 million.”

With Caspian, he adds: “The faith angle is more explicit. Caspian is more of an apostle Paul type of story.”

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Julia Duin is an assistant national editor for religion at The Washington (D.C.) Times.

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A return to true faith

The creators of Prince Caspian felt compelled to keep the classic Christian book true to C.S. Lewis’ literary vision.
By Clive Price

For Douglas Gresham, stepson of C.S. Lewis, the fact that film No. 2 of the Narnia chronicles is about to hit the big screen is an unfolding revelation. “I’m slowly watching a lifelong dream come true,” he told Charisma from his home on the European island of Malta.

“I started thinking about making movies, about the Narnia chronicles when I was in my early teens,” says Gresham, co-producer of Prince Caspian. “Now I’m in my early 60s. That’s a lot of years!”

The latest adventure is “not quite as blatant” in its spiritual content as the first film, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which took theaters by storm in 2005 and had a strong Christian message. “Prince Caspian is about a return to true honor and true faith after centuries of corruption,” Gresham says.

The first film earned $742 million in its worldwide theatrical release and scooped numerous awards. Wide, sweeping landscapes were punctuated with colorful creatures straight out of Lewis’ story.

“Prince Caspian also has this strange and wondrous magic about it,” Gresham says, “which is all part of Narnia.” Lewis blended mythologies of various cultures—including the wild and wonderful Celtic folklore of his own homeland Ireland—to create a rich backdrop.

“Myth was something he felt was important,” Gresham says. “People in today’s world use myth as if it were lies. Myths were ancient man’s blind gropings for God.” Prince Caspian faithfully carries on that Lewis tradition.

Gresham was brought up on the Narnia stories. Now he works for the C.S. Lewis Co., and was co-producer on The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. “I feel I have inherited a somewhat sacred responsibility,” he says.

Gresham is already involved in preproduction on The Voyage of the Dawn Treader and The Screwtape Letters.

Education—as well as edification—is another aim of the Narnia films. “The movies stimulate children to read the books. There isn’t anything better you can do for a child than to stimulate their interest in reading,” says Gresham, who has five children and nine grandchildren.

Englishman Ben Barnes, the actor chosen to play the part of Caspian, was just 8 when he read Lewis’ classic stories for the first time. He went on to study The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe during his university years—where children’s literature was an emphasis of his studies.

“I was such a big fan of the books. … It’s a little boy’s dream that rapidly became the dream of a man in his mid-20s,” he explains.

His character does go through a crisis of faith as part of the action, but the film does not resonate with any Christian background in Barnes’ life. “I wasn’t raised with any particular affiliation,” he says. But he believes the story’s values can still touch people deeply.

Producer Mark Johnson read the stories in his early 20s and wanted to be true to Lewis’ vision. But the story had to be restructured, as it’s told in flashback in the book.

“One of the real strengths of the chronicles is that each book is so different from the one that preceded it and the one that follows it,” Johnson says. “It’s not like making a version of the same film, or even a sequel. Some of the themes are still very much manifest—but there are also a lot of very new ones.”

Johnson—who worked on Rain Man and other films—believes the themes of Prince Caspian are “open to many interpretations.” He has what he calls a “very private” faith but thinks faith is a key aspect of the story.

Perseverance and optimism are also significant elements. “It’s so much about what you can overcome,” he says. “It’s about questioning faith and regaining it—not necessarily a religious faith, but that’s a way anybody can read it.”

Johnson is concerned that filmmakers and theatergoers alike capture the sense of wonder that Lewis promoted through his writings.

“We go [to a movie] for the most primal and romantic urges,” he says. “We want to be told a story, we want something to believe in—and we want to be in awe.”

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Clive Price is a writer based in England and a regular contributor to Charisma. He loves all things Irish and is a student of Celtic Christian history.

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C.S. Lewis: In His Own Words

In author C.S. Lewis’ own words, here are the themes he gave his seven books of the Narnia chronicles:

The Magician’s Nephew: “Creation and how evil entered Narnia”

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe: “Crucifixion and Resurrection”

Prince Caspian: “Restoration of the true religion after a corruption”

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader: “The spiritual life, especially in the person of (the mouse-hero) Reepicheep”

The Silver Chair: “Continued war against the powers of darkness”

The Horse and His Boy: “Calling and conversion of a heathen”

The Last Battle: “The Antichrist, the end of the world and the Last Judgment”

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Source: A letter to Anne Jenkins, March 5, 1961; from C.S. Lewis: A Biography by Walter Hooper and Roger Lancelyn Green (Harcourt, Brace 1994)

In Thailand, where people visit temples to appease thousands of gods, pentecostals are aggressively winning converts.
Not far from the Chao Phraya River that curls about the center of downtown Bangkok is a temple complex surrounding the spiritual and geographic heart of this country of 61 million people. Inside is the ceremonial grand palace of the king of Thailand and Wat Phra Kaew, a temple glistening with orange and green roof-tiles and millions of pieces of mirrored glass that sparkle and glisten in the sun.

The air is full of the sound of tinkling chimes. Scenes from the Ramakian–a Thai-Indian epic–decorate the muraled walls of the cloister surrounding the temple, displaying demonic images that are part human and part bestial with monkey faces.

Before the temple is an outdoor altar to various deities, where devout Buddhists burn incense and place lotus blossoms and chrysanthemums as offerings. Visitors are told to cover their legs with trousers or a long, modest skirt to gaze at the Green Buddha, a jasper quartz or nephrite jade figurine placed on a 20-foot dais overlooking respectful worshipers. The statue even has its own wardrobe: three robes marking dry, rainy and cool seasons, which are changed by the king himself. On the palace grounds sits another statue, this one representing Phra Siam Devadhiraj, which missionary Charles Kraft believes is the governing principality over Thailand. Thais believe this spirit has protected the nation from foreign invaders.

One of the world centers of a religion that claims 360 million followers worldwide is housed in Thailand. This austere religion, based on the principle of obtaining a blissful state–nirvana–after one has sufficiently tamed his or her passions, does not believe in a creator God, much less a loving or benevolent one. Rather it holds to the life principles taught by the Indian prince Siddhartha Gautama, later known as the Buddha. Founded six centuries before Christ, Buddhism eventually settled into three strands: Theravada, Mahayana and Tibetan Buddhism.

Theravada Buddhism, which is prevalent in Thailand and Southeast Asia, is tremendously resistant to Christianity. Despite the heroic and sacrificial work of missionaries and national Christians, the growth rate of the Thai church is one of the slowest in the world. The Four Spiritual Laws do not work well in a society that does not believe in God, and the demands of Sunday church and weekly Bible study do not sit well in a society used to only a few temple visits per year.

Yet Bridge Communications, a book distributor squeezed into sixth-floor offices across the street from an upscale brothel, has the Thai franchise for the blockbuster Left Behind series. It has sold 15,000 copies to date, highly unusual for Christian books in this country. Typically, a Christian book might sell 1,500 copies over two to three years. Tribulation Force, released last May, also is doing well.

Buddhism has little to say about the end of the world. Some Buddhists are fascinated by the idea of a second coming, as there is a legend of another Buddha arriving on the world’s last day to bring about a period of peace.

“Our strategy is to penetrate Christian values and references throughout society using the media,” says managing director Somjai Raksasee. “That works in Buddhist society. If you share the gospel directly with a Buddhist, they will dismiss it as a Western religion. But they won’t throw away something they buy in a bookstore.”

A Resistant Mission Field

Christianity did come to Thailand literally from the West in 1567 through Portuguese Catholic missionaries. They were not allowed to convert the Thai, nor were Protestant missionaries who began arriving in the 1830s. Not until 1878 did King Rama V allow other religions to be proclaimed.

Today, the Thai government recognizes five Christian groups: Catholics, Presbyterians, Southern Baptists, Seventh-day Adventists and the Evangelical Fellowship of Thailand: 1,200 congregations of assorted Protestants.

Outside of Bangkok, churches are smaller and more isolated. In central Thailand north of the capital, congregations are informal affairs in simple buildings where no shoes are allowed, according to Thai custom. One is pastored by a Buddhist convert who sought out Christianity for intellectual reasons. Another was founded in a rice field by a matriarch with leprosy patients for her congregants. It is now mostly made up of local merchants who befriended one another in the weekly marketplace.

Raksasee, who grew up Buddhist and was converted at age 22 through a Christian girlfriend, publishes a Christian magazine, Tomikachun, which means “The Saint,” for scattered Thai Christians. His company also translates material from Focus on the Family: No Apologies and Drug-Proof Your Kids. Both have been distributed in 40,000 secondary schools in Thailand by the government, as there is little other literature available to a society known for its huge numbers of HIV-positive citizens and its notorious sex industry.

“In this way,” Raksasee says, “we build relationships, we build trust, and we help people solve their problems.” Bridge has been operating only four years in Thailand, but it’s already producing some of the country’s top-selling books, such as a children’s Bible. However, there is no Thai Christian radio or TV station, and 90 percent of Bridge’s writers are American. Raksasee can list only 10 Thai Christian authors. “Translating,” he says, “is easier than writing, for us.”

Thailand, a polite country where strangers are greeted by a graceful folding of the hands held to one’s lips, is filled with people who one missionary describes as “pleasantly resistant” to Christianity. Like Japanese Buddhists, the Thai inclination is toward group and community, and their social networks make it extremely difficult for an individual to convert to another religion, thereby becoming a minority and outcast.

Buddhists have no concept of sin, which involves rebellion against a God who they do not believe exists. Suragarn Tangsirisatian, director of Youth for Christ in Thailand, works with university students he says are materialistic and obsessed with sex. Buddhism, which preaches indifference to the world’s longings instead of giving guidance on how to deal with them, has been of little help. Some students even prostitute themselves to earn money for much coveted cell phones, so he distributes copies of No Apologies to teach abstinence.

“In Buddhism, sex is all illusion, so it is no good,” he says. “Sex is evaluated as something that keeps you from nirvana.”

Tavivat Puntarigvivat, a Buddhist scholar at Mahidol University in Bangkok, refutes any claim that sex is illusory to Buddhism but does say the religion is being undermined by corruption within its own clergy and a Muslim minority in its four southernmost provinces.

“Other religions are taking advantage of the weakness of Buddhism in order to gain their converts,” he says. “Muslims in Thailand have been trying to enter Thai politics to pave the way for the growth of Islam in Thailand. They have successfully pressured us to change a number of laws in favor of Islam. The number of their converts is increasing, which alarms Thai Buddhists.”

Tangsirisatian says: “Most students want to know the basics of Christianity. We don’t have persecution in Thailand. We have prejudice against Christians, but not opposition. Thais have an easy-going mentality. It’s hard to confront them. But once we get intense about Christianity, there will be persecution.”

First the Christians need to get educated, says Silawech Kanjanamukda, director of the Evangelical Fellowship of Thailand since 1983. The country has 25 Bible schools and five Bible colleges or seminaries and can use a lot more, he says, such as the Oklahoma-based Rhema Bible Training Center, which set up shop three years ago in southern Bangkok.

Both Raksasee and Kanjanamukda cited Pentecostal churches and training centers as the most effective in reaching the Thai because of their emphases on worship and aggressive evangelism. Wirachai Kowae, who founded the Assemblies of God (AG) in Thailand in 1969, is fiercely independent, friendly and proud of his country to the point that he says the Thai church no longer needs the help of foreign missionaries.

However, he owes his conversion to a 1957 visit by an American evangelist, T.L. Osborn, when he was 15. Today the country has 70 AG congregations that comprise 4,000 to 5,000 members. “The way we present the gospel is midway between gentleness and boldness,” Kowae says. “Thai people are gentle by nature. But you have to be bold enough to tell them what they need to know.”

Bold Witnesses

Theravada Buddhism in particular has strong Hindu and animistic influences, he adds, and can get quite occultic. Flowers or food are put in front of “spirit houses” in even highly sophisticated Bangkok neighborhoods to appease the neighborhood deity. Because Thais perceive the world as supernatural, they have no problem with miracles recorded in the Bible. Human sacrifice is seen as giving great spiritual power, and evidence of it is said to be under certain Thai temples.

Buddhism is the ultimate salvation-by-works program through karma, the idea that a person’s behavior leads to reward or punishment. One contributes to temples or gives food to a monk or even buys a cage filled with sparrows in order to set them free–all to gain merit. When a Buddhist earns enough merit, the evil he or she has done in this or a previous life will be canceled out so he or she will be reincarnated into a better existence.

Many Thai men traditionally become monks at the age of 20 for at least a few months, which brings great merit. The strict lifestyle, which involves keeping some 227 rules, also creates a spiritual stronghold.

Moreover, the king of Thailand is constitutionally required to be a Buddhist. The mantra of Thai life–nation, religion and king–illustrates how religion and monarchy hold the country together. The current king, Bhumibol Adulyadej, is accorded godlike status. Having ascended the throne in 1946, he has been a stable figure in an era that has seen more than 20 prime ministers, 16 constitutions and 17 coups. Even T-shirts of his pet dog are prized.

Not only is the monarchy a source of spiritual energy for most Thais, but King Rama V is often worshiped as deity, and pictures of the royal family are seemingly on every wall in every building in the country. There is a reason for this omnipresent mixture of shrine and state. When the Buddhist base of a society is weakened, other religions can move in, notes Nobutaka Inoue, a Buddhist scholar at Kokugakuin University in Tokyo, who studied the crumbling of Korean Buddhism after World War II.

“Christianity did better in Korea after the war because the Buddhist infrastructure was much weaker there,” he says. “The religious figure–priest, pastor and monk–is less functional these days. The story of Buddha is being spread more through comics,” citing a famed illustrator, Tezuka Osama, as an example.

Thai Buddhism lacks some of the intellectual rigors of Buddhism in Japan, as it is far more superstitious and rife with desires for good luck, power and help from the spirits. And Thai society has Buddhism interwoven into its daily life far more than does Japan, where Buddhism has fragmented and atheism is growing.

But in Thai markets, phallic wood carvings are placed in money baskets in shops or stalls, idols are sold in markets, and zodiac signs are hung about as good luck charms. Amulets also are hot sellers, as are incense sticks to be placed about the outer corners of a home.

Pentecostal worship cracks some of the spiritual resistance, Kowae says. He pastors Romyan Church, a large Bangkok congregation with an adjoining bookstore. It attracts 500 on a Sunday; a huge turnout compared with the typical Thai congregation of perhaps 20 people.

“I do believe this country is under control of the spirit of darkness, whose temples are everywhere,” he says. “A lot of people say the Thai are hard to win, but they’re not. They are open. They have a spiritual hunger. We had people saved at my church last Sunday. We can get them saved, but it’s hard to make them strong.”

It is a challenge to preach to the more passive southeastern Asian personality, he says, and the churches that are growing are the ones with the more aggressive leaders. One was Kriengsak Chareonwongsak, who founded Hope of Bangkok, a Pentecostal denomination that is still going strong.

“Of all the Thai Christians, the Pentecostals are winning converts the fastest because they are aggressive in their presentation,” Kowae says. “Sometimes people here beat around the bush too much.”

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Julia Duin, an assistant national editor for The Washington Times, visited Thailand and Japan in April and May.

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Adherents worldwide: 360 million

Largest concentrations: China, Japan, Thailand, Vietnam, Myanmar

History: Buddhism was founded by a native of India, Siddhartha Gautama (563-483 B.C.), during the sixth century B.C. as a result of a spiritual experience during which he claimed to have attained “enlightenment.” He became the Buddha, or “enlightened one,” and began to teach others the path to this desired state, which he called the “Middle Way” because it eschewed the extremes of both affluence and asceticism.

Gautama won thousands of followers, but for 200 years after his death, Buddhism was confined to his homeland. Not until King Ashoka ruled India (274-232 B.C.) and became a proponent of the new religion did it spread to other countries. Today there are three major branches of the religion: Mahayana Buddhism; Theravada Buddhism; and Vajrayana, or Tibetan,
Buddhism.

Core beliefs: Beliefs among Buddhists are diverse. However, most Buddhists share at least the beliefs contained in Buddha’s Four Noble Truths:

* Life is made up of suffering.

* The cause of suffering is a craving for temporal things.

* The key to freedom from suffering is to eliminate this desire.

* The means to eliminate desire–and therefore suffering–is the Eightfold Path: right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration.

The ultimate goal in life for a Buddhist is to reach “nirvana”–a state of existence that is free from all desire.

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Movie stars have helped make Los Angeles the headquarters of Buddhism in the West.

Los Angeles may be the second largest city in the country, but experts say it has become the first unofficial headquarters of Buddhism in the United States.

According to the Sonrise Center for Buddhist Studies (SCBS) in Sierra Madre, California, a group that seeks to equip and train the Christian community to evangelize Buddhists, Diana L. Eck, director of The Pluralism Project at Harvard University, believes “Los Angeles is writing the history of Buddhism in America.”

It boasts the home of the largest Buddhist temple in the Western Hemisphere, Hsi Lai, or “Coming to the West,” which recently purchased the Christian Narramore Center for $6.5 million for their new Buddhist University.

“All in all, Buddhism is making incredible inroads into America’s religious, political and cultural circles,” say officials for SCBS, which was started in 1988 by Jim Stevens, a Buddhist leader for 14 years before he became a Christian. “It has unfortunately become the religion of choice in Hollywood.”

Buddhism’s influence in America has been bolstered by endorsements by a growing number of celebrities, including singer Tina Turner, actor Richard Gere, model Cindy Crawford, golfer Tiger Woods and Los Angeles Lakers coach Phil Jackson.

Additionally, the latest wave of Buddhist movies such as Little Buddha, Seven Years in Tibet and Kundun have accelerated the visits on the Free Tibet Web site from 500 hits per week to 40,000. According to the Sonrise Center, Gere’s production company has sponsored a tour with Tibetan monks who last year began efforts to build sand mandalas (Buddhist symbols of deities) in 100 U.S. cities within 18 months.

“These will attract hundreds of thousands of unsuspecting seekers and observers who are blind to the reality this represents as this temporary home to 722 Tibetan deities, also known as demons,” SCBS officials say.

To former Thailand missionary Alex Smith, a “minister at large” with Overseas Missionary Fellowship (OMF) International, which specializes in Buddhism, Buddhists are “the neglected giant in missions.”

“Today it claims 10 million followers in the . alone, where over 1,500 Buddhist temples are countable and hundreds of Buddhist associations flourish,” Smith writes in his booklet Buddhism Through Christian Eyes.

Smith believes American churches face a daunting challenge with the recent growth of Buddhism in the West–a phenomenon of the last 50 years that could likely increase in the 21st century.

“Among the major world religions, Buddhism, with its emphasis on meditation, purity, peace and ethics, appears to be the most nonthreatening,” says Smith, who spent 20 years in Thailand with his wife, Faith, serving in pioneer evangelism, church planting and training of national leaders.

Joseph and Hannah Ems, regional facilitators of the Tibetan Buddhist world for the Network for Strategic Missions in Virginia, told Charisma: “Buddhism, especially Tibetan Buddhism, is overtly a power religion with real demonic power displays. It is a ‘do it yourself’ religion, which often suits Westerners seeking freedom to live outside structures of morality, yet meeting their inherent need for spiritual answers.”

Ministries that try to reach Buddhists say prayer is the key. Littleton, Colorado-based OMF has resources for reaching Buddhists as well as for praying for the Buddhist world through its Web sites and .
Eric Tiansay

In spite of Muslim tensions, Jordan has displayed unusual openness to the gospel as Christian tourists visit this ‘other Holy Land.’

They call it the home of the sunrise of Christianity, on the right side of the Jordan River–a country of 150 biblical sites. Often overlooked in the scheme of Middle East politics and prophecy, Jordan is clamoring to become every American’s experience of the Holy Land.

A country of 4.6 million people, it is ruled by a Muslim royal family that shows enormous sympathy toward Christianity to the point of paying for visits by evangelists such as Benny Hinn, David Yonggi Cho, Morris Cerullo and Ulf Ekman of Sweden. Such ministers come with hundreds of paying visitors in their tow, but it is only in the last decade that Jordanians have seen Christian visitors as beneficial to their economy.

The March 2000 visit of Pope John Paul II made Jordanians realize it was time to boost Christian tourism. The country increased its hotel rooms by 40 percent after it signed a peace treaty with Israel in 1994. However, Jordan’s Christian population of 180,000 souls is shrinking. The bulk are Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christians.

Among the 5,000 Protestants, there are five major denominations: Southern Baptist, Assemblies of God, Church of the Nazarene, Christian Missionary Alliance and Evangelical Free. There also is a Oneness Pentecostal church.

Perhaps the best known spokesman for Jordan’s seven Assemblies of God churches is Dikran Salbashian, 48, co-pastor of Weibdeh Assembly of God in downtown Amman. He has served as translator for Benny Hinn since 1995, when the healing evangelist made the first of seven evangelistic trips to Jordan.

“There is not much openness” to the Pentecostal message among Jordanian Christians, Salbashian says, “but we are building bridges with other denominations. Some of the pastors are open to it, but they are afraid of some of the wrong doctrines, such as you must speak in tongues in order to be saved.”

He was encouraged that five of the Protestant groups united in May to sponsor Cho’s visit at the Amman University arena. Some 10,000 people attended over two nights, and organizers recorded more than 400 conversions.

Salbashian’s dreams for his city include a “Middle East Harvest Training Center” that would include a 2,500-seat auditorium (his current church seats 330) and would be the largest evangelical church building in the Middle East. No longer would his church have to get permits for large gatherings or have to rent government-owned meeting halls.

The church has already raised $1.1 million for the facility (70 percent from Jordanians), but it needs an additional $4 million to $5 million more before construction on the 66,000-square-foot lot can begin. This is a huge sum, considering that most Jordanians earn an average monthly income of $125.

“The mentality in the Middle East is that small is good,” Salbashian says. “I like the American mentality: Big is good.”

Fields White for Harvest

To say that Jordan is a strategic country is an understatement. It fronts Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Israel and is a short plane ride from Lebanon and Egypt. Most Arabs, who might have problems obtaining visas into some Western countries, have no problems entering Jordan. One little-publicized factor is the 500,000 Iraqi refugees in Jordan, among whom conversions have been made. Jordanians are willing to evangelize their own people, but lack of funds holds them back, says Isam Ghattas, 59, founder of Manara (Lighthouse) Ministries in Amman.

“American missionaries spend $40,000 to $50,000 a year to learn Arabic,” he says. “And then they go back to the United States after two years. Christianity in Jordan is not a business. It is a relationship.”

Ghattas took a hit three years ago when someone–he suspects Muslim fundamentalists–burned down his Christian bookstore in central Amman. A Christian camp he operates just west of the city of Salt (Job’s birthplace) and 27 miles northwest of Amman was also hit with arson.

Camp Gilead, now repaired, overlooks the Zarqa River valley. Its hills are covered with wheat, and Ghattas’ 2.5 acres facing due west are filled with children ages 7 to 18 during the summer. Organizers hope to raise $250,000 for a three-story, 4,000-square-foot conference center on the property.

But Ghattas and Christians like him must be careful. Muslims are forbidden to change their religion, and people are marked for life with an M or a C on their identity cards. Muslims who are baptized secretly do so without informing their families, who may kill them for dishonoring the tribe.

Yet people here say the harvest is white in Jordan. “This is the key to the Middle East: power evangelism,” Salbashian says. “I believe Benny [Hinn] opened Jordan to the West. He was the first one who embraced loving the Arab and Jew at the same time.”

Hinn has said that evangelicals had “put one arm around the Jews in Israel, and now it was time to put the other arm around the Arabs, since they are God’s children too.” Jordan’s King Abdullah is the member of the royal family who spotted the evangelist’s TV programs and showed them to his father, the late King Hussein. Before he died in 1999, Hussein met with Hinn. His backing was instrumental in encouraging the government Ministry of Tourism not only to allow visits by Hinn and other foreign evangelists, but also to pay for the venues.

When Cerullo held a three-day ministry school in Amman in September 2000, the government hosted him and his 2,000 conferees at the Royal Cultural Center. Public places are not open for religious purposes, especially Christian ones, but everything changes when a Western evangelist shows up with paying tourists in tow.

Sometimes evangelists leave goodies behind, such as the $22,000 Samsung four-wheel drive Cho donated after his May crusade in Amman. The Samsung will help transport tourists at Bethany-Beyond-the-Jordan, the site on the Jordan River where Jordanians believe Jesus was baptized.

The ‘Other Holy Land’

Unlike Israel, Jordan does not have the money or contacts among American Christians to push itself as a destination site. But the Holy Land, Jordanians are quick to say, is on both sides of the river. A year ago, its tourism board retained a Dallas-based Christian public relations firm, A. Larry Ross & Associates, to boost its image among America’s rich mother lode of Christian travelers. Ross, who has represented evangelists Billy Graham and T.D. Jakes, has extensive contacts among evangelicals.

Ross had previously arranged a meeting between Jakes and Akel Biltaji, who was Jordanian minister of tourism until last June. The two men visited Mount Nebo, the famous wind-swept promontory overlooking the Dead Sea, where Moses viewed the promised land.

While visiting the United States last year, Biltaji was invited by Hinn to accompany him during a crusade in Las Vegas. He also put in an appearance in February 2001 at a Jordanian-sponsored reception at the National Religious Broadcasters’ convention in Dallas. Clearly, relationships were being formed.

But in an unusual dinner reception for a group of American clergy and journalists last May, Biltaji was challenged as to why Muslims who converted to Christianity were persecuted in his country. His chilling response: Early Christians were persecuted because they followed Jesus, and present-day converts should expect the same treatment.

All is not paradise in this relatively liberal Islamic state. Jordan has one evangelical seminary, the 150-student Jordan Evangelical Theological Seminary (JETS) founded in 1995. With 270 million people in the Middle East and 19 Arabic-speaking countries, JETS is in a strategic place. President Imad Shehadeh, a Greek Orthodox Palestinian who became born again in the 1970s while a student at the University of California in San Diego, wishes the government allowed the seminary to grow.

“Muslims were once allowed to come,” he says. But he adds that because of the high interest in merely studying Christianity, they now are not allowed to do this. “Muslims could be the majority of students because they are that interested. We could easily have 500 students,” he told Charisma.

The government started cracking down two years ago, first by ejecting seven converts from Islam who were studying at the seminary. Then three students from Iraq, Sudan and Egypt were jailed for several weeks where they slept on concrete with no blankets and were poorly fed. One was beaten so badly he could not move for weeks after leaving prison.

More recently, the government informed JETS that it must approve all appointments for faculty and president, select the seminary’s board of directors, and compel it to hold classes on Sundays. If JETS refuses to accept these dicta, it cannot issue degrees or obtain residential visas for foreign faculty. Visa restrictions are already limiting the foreign student body to Syrians, Iraqis and Egyptians, hardly the broad base the seminary was designed to reach.

“They say persecution is good for the church; well, we’ve had our share of it,” says Shehadeh, who earned his doctorate at Dallas Theological Seminary. “We’re a long way from where we would like to be in terms of human rights.”

Some of the worst opposition, he says, comes from nonevangelicals who petition the government to not accredit the school. By forbidding Muslim evangelism, the government confines Christians to one pen, where they are obliged to steal sheep from one another. This has sewn discord in their ranks.

One of the few gestures of unity among Christians in Jordan was a decision to celebrate their religious holidays on the same day. And the pope’s visit did put the Christian community on the map. “For three days,” said Ghaleb Bader, the Catholic priest who heads the church’s ecclesiastical court in Amman, “Christians in Jordan were at the center of attention for everybody.”

Now is a critical time for Jordan, say all the evangelists who work there. With tourism down since the September 11 terrorist attacks, Jordan’s economy is in a free fall. In addition, the current drought in Israel is a threat to Jordan as well. What would help, Ghattas says, is if Western Christians would pay them a visit.

“We ask Christians to not come here to visit dead stones,” referring to the country’s 30,000 archaeological sites, “but living stones,” referring to Christian believers.

Even Biltaji, the Muslim cabinet member, pleads for visitors: “We’re not begging; we are going even further. We are on our knees asking people to come and see us.”

“Pray for Jordan,” Salbashian says. “Pray that more signs and wonders are released and that Christianity in the Middle East is authentic and not a copy of America.”

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Julia Duin, an assistant national editor for The Washington Times, traveled to Jordan in May.

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Country with largest percentage Christian population:Cyprus (91.8 percent)

Country with smallest Christian population:Sahara (1,000)

Country with smallest percentage of Christians in population:Algeria (0.1 percent)

Largest denomination:Coptic Orthodox Church, Egypt (86.8 million)

Largest Protestant or independent denomination:Coptic Evangelical Church (300,000)

Country with largest Christian growth over last five years:Armenia (from 76 percent to 83 percent)

Fastest growing denomination or movement:Catholic Church, Oman (35 percent)

Percentage of Pentecostals and charismatics in Christian population:0.8 percent (3 million)

Largest non-Christian population:Muslims (308.9 million)

Most dangerous country for Christians:Sudan

Country with most evangelistic efforts per person:Cyprus

Country with most evangelistic efforts for size of population:Egypt

Country with highest Christian income:Egypt

Country with lowest Christian income: Yemen

Since his voice was ruined by surgery, worship leader Bob Sorge has been speaking with quiet authority about faith in the face of frustration.

Why do bad things happen to obedient, faithful Christians? If God allows evil to afflict the believer, is it for punishment or promotion? Does God intend to deliver us out of our troubles?

From the days of Job to today, such questions have plagued millions of people. Rare is the pastor who has a sermon series on unanswered prayer. Charismatic Christians are especially known for expounding on the triumphal life but not dwelling on its perplexities.

Yet the body of Christ is consumed with perplexity and weary of platitudes, says one Missouri pastor, who may be producing some of the most intriguing work available in the United States today on the subject of suffering. Bob Sorge–whose bout with a surgeon’s knife nine years ago left him nearly voiceless–has weighed in on the dealings of God with man to a growing audience of listeners around the world.

Now 44, Sorge was pastor of an upstate New York charismatic church in the spring of 1992 when disaster struck. Formerly the director of music at Elim Bible Institute in Lima, New York, he was developing a nationwide worship ministry and had already written a charismatic textbook titled Exploring Worship. He had built up his nondenominational congregation from 35 members to several hundred people.

Just before setting out to Singapore for an international worship convention, he noticed a mysterious soreness near his vocal chords. By the time he returned from overseas 10 days later, “It felt,” he remembers, “like a marble was lodged in my throat.

Doctors said Sorge had an arytenoid granuloma: an ulcer easily removed by laser treatment. Just before undergoing surgery that August, he was told he would be back in the pulpit within three weeks.

When extreme pain persisted even after the surgery, however, Sorge realized something was terribly wrong: The surgeon’s laser work had singed his throat, causing a permanent rawness.

He could only speak an hour a day–and that at a whisper–before pain took over. For a pastor in his prime, whose living depended on his being able to preach and lead worship, the surgical mishap was calamitous.

Thus started Sorge’s wrestlings with God, what his wife, Marci, calls “the longest valley of our lives.”

“The first year, you walk in denial,” Marci says. “The second year, you realize it is not going to go away. It is total blackness. Then, you have to go deep. You have to have answers.

“He has not had an answer of ‘Why?’ yet,” she continues. “It has changed us on how we relate to people who are weak and broken.”

When Heaven Is Silent

In 1994 Sorge came out with In His Face, a book about the silence of God and why He sometimes delays in answering prayer.

“The first sign that you’ve been pruned is this: God stops talking to you,” he candidly writes. “As frantically as you might beseech heaven, heaven is not talking to you right now.”

Instead, he says, if God does speak, it is on an unrelated matter. “Although God may be silent regarding the things you want Him to talk about, He will be speaking to you the things that are on His heart.”

Before the tragedy, Sorge had borne the attitude, held by many Christians, that suffering was somehow the sufferer’s fault. The common teaching in many circles is that sickness is caused by a lack of faith or a lack of trust in God. But after two years of pain, Sorge says his viewpoint changed.

“God brought me to a new realization that calamity and tragedy come alike to saints and sinners,” he writes. “Just because you’re having troubles doesn’t necessarily mean you’re doing something wrong. Joseph made all the right decisions and still ended up in the blackness of prison.”

Too many Christians, he says, are like Job’s three unhelpful friends: They misdiagnose why a person is suffering and dump more guilt on the sufferer. And charismatics typically espouse a set reason for suffering: “God is disciplining you, and it’s your fault.”

But the disciplines of God are for promotion, not punishment, he explains. The means God uses to perfect His saints are the same means He uses to punish the disobedient. To the undiscerning, it appears to be punishment.

Naturally, Sorge himself had wondered if he was being punished. He had prayed: “Lord, I’ve done everything I know to do: I’ve prayed, I’ve praised, I’ve repented, I’ve fasted, I’ve rebuked, I’ve surrendered.

“I’ve read books, I’ve quoted Scripture, I’ve spent time in Your presence, I’ve reconciled with everyone I could conceive had a problem with me, I’ve gone on an extended personal retreat in solitude.”

The only response he received was Ephesians 6:13: “Therefore take up the whole armor of God, that you may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand” (NKJV).

“Some victories are gained, not through an aggressive posturing of faith, but by simply standing,” Sorge says. “God didn’t deliver Joseph from prison because Joseph had a dynamic stance of faith, but because he kept his gaze fixed upon God. get powerful revelations for other when it came to his own life, he could see nothing.”

Certainly this was true in Sorge’s own life. Hadn’t he been obeying God when this happened? Hadn’t he been fulfilling God’s call to preach?

Bit by bit, things precious to him began to slip from his grasp. The worship ministry vanished overnight. He clung to his pastorate for six more years, preaching three times each weekend, his lips pressed to a microphone for increased volume. But he couldn’t engage in casual conversations with parishioners, much less counsel people.

“The only thing I could do is lay myself out on the carpet and just say, ‘I love You, Lord,'” he told listeners in a speech once. “I mean, there was no intercession in my life for years. There was nothing.

“I was pastoring at the time, and I thought: Boy, this is really bad. My poor church. The pastor doesn’t even pray for them anymore. I used to pray through the whole directory–every person. I stopped all that. I would prostrate myself and say, ‘I can do no warfare.’

“I felt like the stuffing was taken right out of me. All I could say was: ‘I love You. If this is an attack, I’m lunch. All I can do is love You, Lord.’ As I look back, I am convinced that is the most powerful warfare I could have done.”

Enduring the Testing

Six years after his affliction hit and what was left of his voice grew weaker, Sorge resigned his pastorate at Zion Fellowship in Canandaigua, New York.

“It’s hard to pastor a body of people when you are trying to keep your own head above water,” Marci says. “It just came to a place where it became impossible at the relational end.”

Chris Wood, now senior pastor at Zion Fellowship and Sorge’s assistant for six years, agrees. “It came to a point where the frustration of being a senior pastor and not doing the things his heart yearned to do was too much. He couldn’t interact with his staff or congregation.”

The one bright spot was a 1994 encounter at a conference featuring speakers Mike Bickle, former pastor of Metro Christian Fellowship in Kansas City, Missouri, and director of the International House of Prayer of Kansas City; and Paul Cain, who operates a prophetic ministry in the same area.

Cain’s prophecies over Christian leaders, notably John Wimber, have not been without controversy, but when Tommy Reid, pastor of the host church, suggested Cain might have a word, Sorge was ready to listen.

“Paul Cain prophesied there would be a day of deliverance when [Sorge’s] voice will open up,” Wood recalls. “We don’t know when that day will be, but we’re standing with him.”

Two years ago, the Sorges moved to the Kansas City area, where Marci volunteers as personnel director for the International House of Prayer, and the family attends Metro Christian Fellowship. By this time, Bob had come out with several books, such as The Fire of Delayed Answers and The Fire of God’s Love, and word had started to get out about his unusual insights.

“People really do listen to him,” says Art Cole, a staff pastor at Grace Chapel, a Foursquare church in Tucson, Arizona, where Sorge has been invited to speak twice. “He speaks to issues most Christians have and about which most don’t have answers for.”

In fact, Cole adds, inviting Sorge to speak is a bit “like open-heart surgery. It’s uncomfortable, but there’s healing.” Sorge had wryly noted to him that he gets people’s attention more without a voice than in the days when he had one.

An old friend of his, Wayne Clarke, who pastors Sabre Springs Foursquare Church north of San Diego, says Sorge galvanized his small congregation when he came there in February 2000.

“God tests our love,” Sorge told the Sabre Springs church. “He says, ‘Do you love Me?’ I said: ‘Yes, Lord, I love You. I am crazy about You.’ He says: ‘What will you do when I offend you? If you hang out with Me long enough, I will offend you.’

“Because the fact is,” Sorge continued, whispering into the microphone the way he has since the botched surgery, “He offends everybody, if you stick with Him long enough. He offended the disciples. He offended the Pharisees. He offended everybody. Finally, Jesus said, ‘Are you guys going to leave, too?’

“And Peter had to admit he was offended, but he said: ‘Where else do we go? What are the options? You have the words of eternal life.’ But the question He comes back to with Peter is: ‘Do you love Me?’

“The cross is His invitation to love, how much He loved us, and how we can love Him back. Our cross becomes our marriage bed where we express our deepest love for Him. And the sight of us on our cross reminds God of His Son on His cross.”

It’s an arresting message.

“When Bob is speaking, even in that hushed whisper, there is an intensity that comes across that adds to his message,” Clarke says. “Of course you can’t be a worship leader or a pastor without your voice. I’m sure he’s been pulled through a knothole backward.”

“I haven’t been able to sing for 7-1/2 years,” Sorge told the Sabre Springs church. “For any of you who can lead worship, you must understand what that can be like. It’s an injury that has radically traumatized and transformed every area of my life.

“As pastor, husband, father, teacher, conference speaker, every area of my life–everything I thought was my identity–was profoundly affected. Everything was shut down, and I found myself in an incredible crisis theologically, emotionally, physically, relationally.

“Virtually every area of my life was touched by this. It catapulted me into a desperate pursuit of God. I’ve discovered that God knows how to make us desperate.” <P > Ministry From the Heart

A tall, sensitive man who works out of an office in his home, Sorge takes time to bake bread for his wife and three children, who range in age from 12 to 18. His days are filled with writing, answering voluminous amounts of e-mail and managing his Web site, which lists his frequent speaking engagements.

Charismatic pioneer and teacher Judson Cornwall, who has known Sorge since his Elim Bible school days, says his protegé shows a level of spiritual passion and friendship with God rarely seen among worship leaders.

“I believe the future will reveal that Bob’s greatest ministry has been his writings,” Cornwall told Charisma. “There’s a vast difference in tone between Bob’s first and later books. The first was written from his head. The second and others have come from his heart.”

But it is a broken heart, and Sorge admits that just as many Christians are broken by suffering as are transformed by it. Or they slip into a numb resignation for the rest of their lives.

“There are casualties,” he said during an interview in his home in Lee’s Summit, Missouri, 20 miles southeast of Kansas City. “Satan is gambling he can turn you into a casualty, and God is testing you to see if you will become a spiritual giant.

“A friend always loves. A friend of God loves God even in the toughest of times. This is the litmus test of friendship with God: Do I still love Him, even when He allows inexplicable trauma to hit my life?

“A lot of conservative evangelical slant on suffering is that God is omniscient, sovereign, and He knows best,” Sorge continues. “So we throw up our hands and just kind of cope. That particular approach doesn’t satisfy people in crisis. I’ve had to seek after answers that satisfy me in my pain.

“The key word here is purpose. God has a purpose. The invitation for us is to press violently into it. If you want to find purpose, you first have to find God. Without God, there is no purpose.

“A lot of Christians will say, ‘Just don’t ask why.’ I am not in that camp. Jesus asked why. David asked why. The Bible is full of people who had questions. God is to be wrestled with. He has unfolded purpose to me.”

God has accelerated a character change in the dark night of his soul, Sorge says. The pastor often refers to Job, the first book of the Bible to have been recorded.

“That makes it a cornerstone of Scripture,” he says. “Satan’s accusation is that you have a tyrant for a father. The cynic will look at this and be bitter at God. The saint will be transformed by this.”

That’s why Sorge doesn’t buy the theology that death will deliver him from his afflictions. The scriptural pattern shows that “there is a deliverance God intends for His beloved in this life,” he says. “The pattern of Scripture is that God’s man is eventually vindicated.

“My conviction is that God has allowed this in my life for a specific purpose,” he continues. “Basically I am ‘unto death’ on this thing. I have assurances from Him He will heal me. I am waiting on Him to fulfill His Word. The alternative is to shut down, cope and level a lawsuit against the doctor who did this to me–that is, cope until I die. But that is not God.”

Does he ever have doubts?

“Every day is a fight of faith, which is necessary to bolster myself in the assurance God has given me. The other voices scream at me, that I am delusional: ‘It’s been nine years, Bob. Wake up and smell the coffee. You are handicapped for life.’ Everywhere I turn, I am bombarded by negative unbelief.”

And so he waits.

“God is the master of suspense,” he says. “He wants to take you into a story with suspense and intrigue, mystery, finale and conclusion, and give you a testimony to His glory. If you get it all up front, it’s boring.

“He loves to deliver us out of situations where there is no possible way out. Then He sweeps in.”

Julia Duin is an assistant national editor for The Washington Times.