Ask Noah

“Hope deferred maketh the heart sick: but when the desire cometh, it is a tree of life.” Proverbs 13:12

This weekend, my church held its long-anticipated Fight Club men’s conference.

To understand what a big deal that is, you have to consider a few facts. First, most people who attend our church are female. Second, the women have a gigantic annual “Girlfriends” conference which lasts several days and draws maybe a thousand people. Third, the church is located in an area where men tend to do very badly compared to women. There are a lot of single mothers, and there are a lot of underachieving men.

Our last men’s conference was in 2009, during the summer. It has been very hard to get the church leadership interested in doing another one. They know there isn’t much money in it, and they have other irons in the fire. It may also be that they find small conferences embarrassing. I can’t say.

One of my friends, a former Muslim named Suliman, was affected very strongly by the last conference. He talked to the church leadership, and he started walking around with a sheet of paper, collecting names of men who were interested. In my prayer group, we talked about this a lot, and in our small 5 a.m. men’s meetings, we prayed for God to help us get another conference.

My friends and I are very conscious of the need to get men into relationships with God. My church is on the border of the ghetto, where the problems with irresponsible men are very obvious, but coming from a more affluent background, I can tell you the problem is universal. It’s just harder to spot in the suburbs. Wealthy men ignore their sons. They don’t go to church. They chase skirts. A lot of them are alcoholics.

The sons tend to pay the price for their fathers’ selfishness and ambition. They are often less successful. Many end up gay. They take drugs. They commit suicide. But as long as a man provides money, he is considered a model dad.

Women need male leadership. It’s unfashionable to say it, but it’s true. When women lead, they take us down the wrong roads. We end up with leftists in power. We exalt the environment above the people who live in it. We become more tolerant of perversion. We get into sick cults. We attack the positive aspects of masculinity, forgetting that men built the world, and that much of human progress would never have taken place, had women had control.

If you want to see what happens in a feminized society, look at a video of the Occupiers having a pow wow. It’s disgusting. Spindly, effeminate, manipulative men appeal to the crowds for approval, with scary lesbians at their sides. As a result many of our parks are now full of sewage, discarded needles, empty beer bottles, and kids with brand-new incurable venereal diseases, not to mention pregnancies.

The world got this way because men thought leadership was a reward for their amazing awesomeness, not a burden and a responsibility to be carried with honor and humility. It got this way because many women like to rebel and take charge. Aggressive women filled the leadership vacuum, and the enemy whispered ridiculous ideas into their ears. See Genesis 1 for more information.

Apart from a desire for a men’s conference, we wanted more of the Holy Spirit. My little group has been having a tongues revolution. We are getting increased faith, power, cleansing, and revelation. You would have to see it to believe it. But our church is very worldly, so the services don’t have the same fire or authenticity. There are probably people in our church who would strip naked, paint themselves blue, and run in circles in the parking lot if they thought it would increase attendance and tithing and get us on TBN. We hear a lot about self-help and positive thinking. We hear about the wonderful government money we get from time to time, as though it came from God. We hear crude language from the pulpit, and we see crude videos and hear secular music from depraved artists. It’s frustrating, because a few of us are really getting to know God, and it should be happening to everyone in the church.

I was excited when I heard there was a decision to have a conference. My friends and I got behind it. We pushed it on Facebook and in our daily routine. We talked about it. We prayed about it. We had very high hopes.

God did not let us down. I’ll just put it that way. We were getting very tired and discouraged, but when he came through, he came through in a big way.

We could not afford big names, with something like $6000 in ticket sales. We got a young evangelist named Tim Ross, and we got a Florida pastor named Jim Raley. Tim Ross has worked with T.D. Jakes. That doesn’t mean much to me, but it got him in the door. I’ve seen Jim Raley preach before, and it didn’t do a whole lot for me.

On the first night, we were told our pastor had a word, so Tim Ross would not get to teach. I am not going to say I was happy. Instead, he gave a testimony. He told about his life. He was the product of an ectopic pregnancy, and he was a breech birth, but somehow he made it. He said God told his mother about him before he was born, and that he told her to name him Timothy. He said he had fallen into promiscuity, pornography addiction, and pride. But one day, at the age of 19, he came forward in church, testified, gave his life to God, and started crying like a baby.

I’m not doing it justice. You had to be there. It was clear that the Holy Spirit was speaking through him. He gave men hope. He reminded us that God is real, and that he redeems. He can turn us around and change our circumstances. He made us believe it. The crowd was very moved. They were ready for more. This is the kind of thing they had been thirsting for.

Unfortunately, it was too short.

Our pastor delivered his sermon, which was very long. I believe it was about listening to the Holy Spirit when he tells you to do things at inconvenient moments. He told us about going to a hotel lobby early in the morning to work on a sermon. He ran into two toughs who were not believers, and he started talking to them. One of them wandered off, and the other rejected everything my pastor said. I have to say that I was not inspired.

There were problems with the lights on the stage. He was clearly angry about it, and he scolded the lighting people twice, which was not pleasant to hear. Toward the end, he was supposed to read a blog post his cousin had put up on the morning of his death, and it disappeared from his Ipad. A long, uncomfortable time passed while he tried to find it. People were fidgeting.

It was as though the Holy Spirit had given him a public reprimand. Tim Ross revived us and gave us hope and motivation, and then we got the long, strange sermon with the awkward interruption.

The end came as a relief. After the sermon, we had some boxing matches, but as usual, the church played dance music so loud no one could talk. The kids like it, you know. I went up to the guy running the sound panel, and I reminded him that the church was not a gay bar. Three hundred men did not need dance music. I got nowhere with that. People told me how frustrated they were with the noise. So we gave up and enjoyed the fights.

The next day, we started off with Tim Ross. He told us about Joseph. He reminded us that Joseph’s problem wasn’t that he was favored by God, or that he didn’t conceal it. His problem was that he was proud of it. He rubbed people’s noses in it. He had no compassion. He didn’t see that he was created to fill needs, not to receive admiration and praise.

Again, I don’t do it justice, but he preached the doors off the place. It was very obvious that he wasn’t speaking by his own power or intelligence. God was with him, and that won the men over. He gave them what they were really thirsty for.

When lunch came, I knew the men needed to talk to each other. This was our chance to help each other. We could discuss what we had heard and benefit from it. The church had tables set up outside, and there were hot dogs, and there was pizza. Then I saw the dreaded PA system being set up. I knew we were about to be subjected to obnoxious dance music at subway-wreck levels. I asked if there was any possibility they could keep it low enough so we could talk, and the request was dismissed instantly. I said it was too bad, because we wanted to talk about God. A young pastor said, “It’s a big church.” No respect whatsoever. So if we wanted to talk about God, we were supposed to forgo lunch, hide in a corner somewhere, and whisper to each other.

Later in the day, Jim Raley took the stage. His subject? The Holy Spirit. I could not believe it. We don’t get Holy Spirit manifestations on the stage at my church. We are discouraged from freaking people out. We talk about things that make people feel good, and we urge them to give money. So when he got up there and started telling us about the importance of the power of the Holy Spirit, I sat up and listened.

I have a friend named Alonzo. A year or two ago, he started noticing the things that were happening to me, and he listened when I said it was all the result of prayer in tongues. He decided to try it, and before long, he was teaching people and delivering powerful testimony of the things God was doing in his life. For months, we’ve been talking about the need to put the Holy Spirit first and get people praying in tongues. We’re minor figures at the church. Very few people pay any attention to us. If they put us on stage, no one would listen. But Pastor Raley was what we (sadly) call a “VIP.” Unlike us, he was not without honor, so people paid attention. And he said exactly the same things we wanted to say. We were sitting in the back row, cheering and clapping. We were amazed. God was coming through on those long months of prayer. He had remembered.

Pastor Raley got the men extremely wound up. They could sense the presence of God. They knew he was right. When he invited people to approach the stage, and he told people to lay hands on them and help them receive the baptism, the place went nuts. Every man in the church was up there. People were crying. One young man who trusted me and Alonzo, and who had been wanting the gift, got transformed beside the altar. A highly disturbed kid who had roamed through the church cursing earlier in the day–a kid we had to take aside and talk to after he called me a honky–ended up praying in tongues with both hands in the air. A problem kid we have been after for months was by his side.

You have to appreciate the contrast. One red-hot testimony. One disturbing and awkward sermon. A teaching that got people on their feet. And then a visit from God, which had people screaming and getting on their knees.

The church served chili outside at the tables. I prayed we would get relief from the screaming and loud drums. I saw a young man working on the sound system. The young pastor was nowhere around. I talked to the sound guy, and he agreed to turn the racket down. He understood completely.

About eight of us took a table by a speaker. We had an amazing conversation. I guess the oldest one of us was 70, and the youngest was 18. We shared our testimony. We talked about what worked for us. We encouraged each other. I can’t describe it. If only we had had the chance to do the same thing at lunch. But our church likes noise. During the time between services, it’s like a strip club at 4 a.m. Sometimes you have to go to the parking lot to talk.

The following morning, the regular crowd was in church. Tim Ross taught again. He taught about the difference between religion and a relationship.

I don’t think he had any idea that he was handling live wires. Had he been familiar with my church’s teaching, he would never have said what he did. Or maybe he would have. I don’t know him.

He talked about the men who tore tiles off a roof to lower a paralyzed man to Jesus to get healed. He talked about the need to get to God, in person.

He said religious people have to have things their own way. They have to have a certain type of music. They think that people who want to get delivered have to come forward in front of everyone and then fill out “decision cards.” He said Jesus could deliver them right where they were sitting.

The upsetting thing about this is that my church started using decision cards last year or the year before. And we have altar call after altar call. We tell people they have to come up and acknowledge God publicly. In other words, it was as if God had given Tim Ross a list of the things we were doing wrong–the obstacles we were putting in front of people–and had him read them out in front of the people who were making us do them.

I felt sorry for my pastor. He wants to do the right thing. He has busted his hump for God all his life. He could be getting rich selling cars somewhere instead of dealing with this. But it seemed like God was addressing him directly, before the church, in order to get him to change his methods.

Unfortunately, the pastor followed Tim Ross and raised Cain with the church for failing to fill the Thanksgiving food drive bin. He was clearly angry at us, and it brought us down to hear it. I felt like he was blaming us for a blessing that may have been blocked by his own mistakes. If a ministry does right, God blesses it with success. I had completely forgotten about the food drive, and I’m sure other people had forgotten, too. After hearing the scolding, I asked God what I should do, and the answer I got was, “nothing.” So I didn’t drive to the store to get food.

Then the next service came. And Pastor Raley got up.

The last service usually ends at 2:30 (2:35 when then speaker is in love with his own voice and forgets that people in the crowd have lives). Pastor Raley quit at 3:07. I was standing the whole time. I got stuck working a position where I was not allowed to sit. I could not have cared less. It was worth it. Nobody wanted to leave. It was “Holy Spirit this” and “Holy Spirit that.” The crowd was on fire. We just don’t get this stuff very often.

Then he prophesied over the pastor, which suggested to me that God is going to get him on track and do great things through him, which would be tremendous. And we got hollered at a little more about the food drive. You take the bad with the good.

I can write this stuff because no one I know down here reads my blog or has any interest in what I think. And if I got in trouble at my church, the penalty would be to go to a church closer to me, where they would ask very little of me.

I felt like we got rain this weekend, but it came in two flavors. When Tim Ross and Jim Raley spoke, I felt like we were withered plants getting a long-awaited drink. I literally felt like my thirst was being satisfied. But at other points, I felt like a plant being beaten down by a cloudburst. When rain is too harsh, it can break a plant down when it’s trying to grow. Some of the things I heard were discouraging, and they hurt. They seemed to reveal a lack of empathy, humility, and gratitude. When the Spirit is blocked, things don’t work, and people get frustrated. And frustration leads to misdirected anger and blame.

I am growing less concerned about finding a good church. I used to think more in terms of what the church could do for me, but more and more, I feel like what I do for others makes the disappointments worth tolerating. I used to see myself as someone who went to church to be taught and to get his needs met, but I have given up on those goals. I watch Perry Stone. I pray. I read the Bible. I talk to Spirit-filled friends. I barely notice the sermons in the sanctuary, unless it’s a guest or one of those times when God gets through the defensive line. I almost feel like a missionary. I guess that’s good enough.

While Alonzo and I were in the back row on Saturday, yelling and clapping, I told him, “This makes all the crap I’ve gone through here worth it.” And it was true. Satan fights Christians wherever they go, and that includes church. Maybe it’s a life-giving spa for some of us, but for others, I guess it will always be more like a courthouse. A place where you go to put your foot on your enemy’s neck.

We made huge progress this weekend. We didn’t have a huge crowd or a big profit, but lives were changed permanently, and the men who were changed and empowered will change and empower others. God proved he had heard us. He had given us this dream. He had moved us to pray about it. He wasn’t going to have us tread out the corn and then muzzle us.

We’re getting rewards. One of us got a revelation that he was called to be a pastor. While he and his wife were in church, she got a vision. She saw the angels, and Jesus, beckoning. She’s probably the one who would have shut him down if he had tried to become a pastor, so this was a great gift.

I feel different now when I pray in the Spirit. I feel like I’m drinking. That’s appropriate.

This stuff really works. If you let it. If you don’t choke the kingdom of God with your own worldly manure, it will grow. Bad doctrine and bad policies can hinder things, but the Holy Spirit’s flow is called water for a reason: it finds its way around and through obstacles. It will fill any container, regardless of the shape.