Deadly Vows Page 5

Sean, however, probably wasn’t thinking about that kind of thing at all. Instead, he was tossing and turning about the journey he would embark upon the next day, when he married the young girl he had been wooing since before she was old enough to drive.

  Chapter 4

  ANTIOCH

  Sean treated his young bride more like a daughter than a wife at times. Though they were loving and affectionate with each other, she naturally fell into a role of subservience as Sean flourished in the role of spiritual leader and head of the household. It was something he had dreamed about his entire life—not the marriage itself, which he largely saw as the means to an end; authority had always been his golden apple.

  Growing up with three brothers who were bigger and stronger than him was difficult for Sean, whose family and friends call him “Bear” to this day. But as the smallest, weakest boy, “Bear” always got the short end of the stick, so he used his superior intelligence to even the odds—a difficult task, because his brothers are as brilliant as Sean.

  When Sean finally did find something he could control—his young wife—he threw himself into the relationship with everything in him. Though people outside the marriage didn’t know it yet, in Sean’s mind, a husband’s authority over his wife was absolute. And his wife, who was too young to protest, played along, feeding his authority with her submission as he tightened his grip on every aspect of her life, from what she ate to whom she hung out with—and when.

  However, at Harbor of Praise, the church where they had met, trouble was brewing. A self-proclaimed “prophet”—nearly blind, balding and willing to speak up whenever he felt the Lord had so moved him—told the pastor that God had declared the church (which the pastor had paid to build) wasn’t really his church.

  The “prophet” declared that there was a change coming in the leadership of the church. The next week the pastor preached that he didn’t care what anyone said, it was his church. For many congregation members that was the last straw.

  Sean and a group of friends left Harbor of Praise, the church where he had met his wife, and formed a new church, The Antioch Ministry, giving it that name because Antioch, Greece (now in Turkey) had been the first place where Jesus’s followers were called Christians. Sean’s younger brother, who was attending OU by then, and his wife started attending the new church, as did several other families, including Sean’s wife’s parents and sister. Sean naturally fell into the role of the pastor.

  At age twenty-two, Sean Goff became the spiritual leader for an entire church full of people. His powerful and engaging preaching quickly drew a large congregation, and the spectacle of one so young being so well-versed in the Bible helped, too. His preaching had the rare quality of appealing to the guttural Pentecostal sensibility while still engaging the cerebral. It was violent, explosive, yet well-thought-out and literate.

  Sean asked me to be the new church’s music leader. Though I knew only two or three church songs, I agreed. I was twenty-one. There were a lot of older people in the church, but the team in charge of ministry were all under the age of twenty-five. Such a group of people barely old enough to vote leading a church of course drew young people to the congregation, but older people also found themselves drawn there by the fundamentalist foundation of the ministry, a Bible-centric doctrine that appealed to wide swaths of people.

  Sean and I developed a symbiotic style after a month or so. Taking a cue from the black churches we both loved and respected reverentially, we developed an idea that music enhanced preaching. After the congregational songs were over, I would take my Washburn acoustic guitar and sit down behind Sean, who was always dressed in perfectly-pressed khakis, a black, braided leather belt and a dress shirt and tie. His sermons always started slow, with him speaking amiably to the congregation, slowly building as his voice would catch between words while he gulped in air, punctuating his sentences, with the occasional affirmative questioning “Amen?” thrown in for good measure, his pitch rising as the cadence of the sermon intensified.

  I would start playing riffs that sounded to me like the Hammond B-3 organ music in black churches, slow and mellow at first, but gaining in speed, power and intensity as Sean’s sermon built, too. As his volume and cadence peaked, so would mine on the guitar. As his preaching lulled into a valley, my guitar would slow down and get quieter, too. It was as if we were both preaching the sermon together, he with words, me with music.

  Sean even likened our dual style of ministry to the biblical King David, who had, according to the Bible, cast a demon out by playing a stringed instrument for it.

  “Man, I wish more people could have heard the way you two flowed together,” said Dwayne Williams, a guitarist who played with a professional Christian musician named Kenny Anderson who sometimes appeared at the church. “It was really something. I remember when y’all let Kenny and me join in one time, it just felt like such an honor to be in the middle of that flow.”

  When his preaching would reach a fever pitch, Sean was at his virtuoso best: his uncle Jake, his grandmother, Jimmy Swaggart, Billy Graham and Paul the apostle all rolled up into one skinny twenty-two-year-old prancing across the stage with a grace and ease that belied the fire and brimstone pouring out of his mouth, exuding the power of God to a congregation hungry for evidence of God’s presence in their lives.

  Sean’s preaching was truly amazing. If ever a preacher was inspired by God, surely Sean was. The raw, emotional delivery of the sermons was matched by the intelligence behind them. It was at once both animalistic and sublime. Like a caged beast, he would stomp from one side of the stage to another, heel to toe, his lace-up Ropers pounding the floor, microphone in one hand, floppy leather Bible in another as the guitar and his voice swelled, ebbed and flowed. When he really wanted to make a point, he would leap off the stage and prance back and forth between the rows of chairs or pews, microphone in tow, firing off scripture after scripture in a cadence that felt more like machine gun volleys than a church service.

  No one could come away without being captivated. It was poetry in motion, theology for the common person delivered with thunderous power that seemed impossible for the 140-pound body that delivered it.

  It was a spectacle that almost immediately turned the church into a destination for believers starving for something vital and significant. Rather quickly, the church started to burst at the seams of the small storefront it had rented in Del City, just outside Oklahoma City. Many days, Sean would get up at five in the morning and drive from Norman to the church, fervently praying there for God to bless the church and the congregation members while revealing his power through signs and miracles.

  Sometimes, I and others joined him at those early-morning prayer sessions. Other times, he went it alone. On Sundays, church started in the morning, stretched into the afternoon and in the space between services, many stayed to pray, sing and prepare for the evening service. In many senses, church went all day on Sundays. I was generally there from nine in the morning until nine or ten at night, and Sean usually was, too, except for a lunch break.

  The hunger of the congregation seemed to draw it out of him and me. We were being pulled beyond the level we believed our own talents would allow us to achieve by the sheer power of the desire of the members of the congregation to reach higher toward God. As the group grew in number, word began spreading like a juicy rumor, and before we knew it, half of the people in each service were people we either barely knew or didn’t know at all.

  At the center of it all was a man barely old enough to drink—though he would never have dreamed of doing so. Eventually, the church had to move to a shopping center in Moore, Oklahoma, just north of Norman. The new storefront had room for more than two hundred people and, since it had been a church before, we didn’t have to modify it to move in, except for a few cosmetic things. Almost immediately, the new building was packed with people and it became apparent that the Moore location would likely be temporary, too, as the church seemed poised to rapidly outgrow it. Though we were a
ll working hard to make it happen, it also seemed like we were just along for the ride, as the power of Sean’s charisma and preaching created a wake that drew everyone in behind him.

  The new church’s youth pastors moved just outside Oklahoma City to a ranch on a dirt road, where they took in troubled youths and tried to guide them back to the “straight and narrow” path of Christianity. Though no one knew it at the time, the ranch ministry was the beginning of a seam in the unity of the church that would later be unable to withstand the stresses placed on it by the explosive growth of the congregation.

  We simply were overwhelmed by the exponential increase in the size of the congregation. Sean was a great preacher, but being a pastor required skills he didn’t yet possess. None of us did. We had fooled ourselves into believing “the anointing” would take care of everything we needed to do to shepherd a congregation of believers, but preaching, music and desire weren’t enough to face the realities of so many personalities gathering together in one place—especially when those personalities were each convinced absolutely of the correctness of their own belief systems to the exclusion of all others.

  With Sean at the top of his game, Antioch was making noise in the Oklahoma City area, and it began to attract two types of people that Sean desperately wanted to keep away: “church hoppers” and habitual rabble-rousers.

  The first were relatively easy to deal with: ignoring them caused them to “hop” on to the next church, where they might get more attention. At Antioch, we weren’t prepared to give them the kind of attention they had come to expect from a pastoral staff, so when they felt neglected, they left. The second group of undesirables, however, proved to be the ultimate undoing of Antioch. Two self-proclaimed “prophets” with divergent visions for the future of the church began to roost in the congregation, each attracting followers and, before anyone knew what was happening, the church was silently divided down the middle, with Sean as the common thread in the division.

  An older, more experienced pastor might have seen the rending coming and taken steps to head it off, but Sean was oblivious to the division until it was too late. We could see it developing but we naïvely believed that God would intervene to shake out the bad seeds, as we saw them.

  One of the “prophets,” the man who had told Harbor of Praise’s pastor that the church wasn’t his, saw a vacuum of leadership in the church.

  In 2012, twenty years after Antioch, the “prophet” told me that he had liked Sean in the beginning. But it wasn’t long before he was able to “see through him.”

  The “prophet” added that Sean just really wasn’t what he was supposed to be. He suggested that he might have possibly seen what Sean would become. Asked for more specifics of what he thought he had seen in young Sean, he clammed up. “It was a long time ago.”

  The second “prophet,” a younger man who was soft-spoken and resistant to attention being focused on him, saw a different vision. He saw a church where God was moving and blessing that needed little or no guidance from older ministers, a church heading toward a storm, but one it could weather if everyone banded together. At one New Year’s Eve service, the younger “prophet” said that God had shown him Antioch as a tower with three men standing on it. Sean was one, I was another and the third was unidentified. That “prophecy” touched off a firestorm, with half of the church saying that the younger prophet had named himself as one of the three people on the tower, signifying that he saw himself as integral to the church’s future. An audio recording of the service revealed that he had not, but it was too late for those who were upset at the idea that a self-proclaimed prophet might be trying to take over the church.

  Sean was the lightning rod for each side’s position. Some saw the confidence that had made him so attractive as a preacher as nothing more than arrogance, while others saw in him a youthful vitality sorely lacking in “dead” churches—which is what we called churches that were not as experimental. That vitality was absolute in our minds, even going so far as one of us asking the city if we could paint “BEFORE” underneath one of the handicapped parking spaces’ icons, which portrayed someone sitting in a wheelchair, indicating that if they came to the Antioch ministry, they would no longer need their wheelchairs when they left. Those who saw Sean as arrogant tended to seek the older prophet for advice and leadership. The others gravitated toward the younger prophet.

  Then, almost without warning, a large group of church members announced that they and the older prophet were leaving to form a new church. Among them were the youth ministers. Sean saw this as the ultimate betrayal—the family he had brought along with him to share in the ministry as youth leaders was now leaving to follow the new “prophet.” Sean was gravely hurt by the youth ministers siding with the older prophet and he never got over it.

  The female youth minister recently discussed with me why her family left Antioch. Sean had come out to the ranch-based youth ministry and strongly rebuked her, saying she wasn’t submissive to her husband. She was twenty-two years old and was trying to do the best she knew. Sean compared her to Jezebel.

  Jezebel, the woman known in the Bible for usurping her husband’s authority—to the detriment of him and the entire kingdom of Israel—was a princess of Phoenicia who married into the royal family of Israel and became infamous for converting her husband, King Ahab, from the religion of the Jews to the Phoenician religion of Baal worship and then convincing him to allow temples of Baal to come into use in Israel, which considered Baal to be a false god. After Ahab’s death, Jezebel worked to ensure that her sons would ascend to the throne of Israel. The prophet Elisha proclaimed that another man should be king; that man killed Jezebel’s son and incited court officials to throw Jezebel out of a window and then leave her corpse where it fell. Her body was eaten by dogs, a serious breach of Jewish burial practices and a symbol of just how hated Jezebel was by the devout Jews of the time.

  In fundamentalist Christian belief, there are few affronts as damning as calling a woman a “Jezebel,” which portrays her as a pagan, sexually immoral, manipulative, scheming and ultimately unworthy of even a proper burial after her deserved death.

  But Sean used the term freely, readily calling “rebellious” women Jezebels, both in jest and in earnest, depending on his tone of voice. The female youth minister saw it as a deep and abiding insult and an intentional attempt to injure her—one that ultimately worked, leaving a lasting wound.

  She added that there was some question over the harshness of Sean’s marriage, too. She remembers hearing about an incident where he spanked his wife with a belt for something she had done.

  Sean had spanked his young wife more than once. He told me proudly that he had done it when she had gotten out of line, but I hadn’t known at the time whether to take that statement seriously, since it was so inconsistent with my understanding of how marriages were supposed to work.

  The woman’s husband also remembers when Sean’s luster began to dim for him. He observed a lot of pride come into Sean, especially at the Antioch Ministry. Sean appeared to think he ran everything and he made end runs around the church board whenever he wanted to.

  One end run the youth minister was referring to was that Sean bought music equipment for the church—a keyboard and a sound system—without seeking approval from the church board first. But the older prophet went a step further when he described why he believes his group had soured on Sean:

  As he put it, the Spirit of God was in the process of being withdrawn from Sean, and, in terms of Sean’s ministry, “It was pretty well over with” even before Sean left Antioch.

  Whether or not he actually is a prophet, in this case he was wrong. Sean’s ministry, if anything, became much bigger after Antioch, as he became one of the most in-demand preachers on the evangelism circuit that runs through America’s South and overseas to places like India, where Sean found himself preaching to tens of thousands of people at a time.

  The Sunday after the church split, when Sean announced that th
e Antioch Ministry, unable to pay for the larger storefront with so many members leaving, would close, he reached out to me afterward for a hug. As he embraced me, Sean did something I never saw him do on any other occasion: he began heaving and sobbing with tears. He was completely broken by the demise of the church he saw as his baby.

  It forever changed the young preacher. He would never be dumped again. Sean became an expert at reading the signals and reacting before he could ever get dumped.

  Chapter 5

  INDIA

  After Antioch fell apart, those who found themselves on Sean’s side scattered. Sean and I ended up at a church in Norman called MetroChurch that was pastored by a moderately successful Christian recording artist. Sean immediately started serving as an advisor to the pastor on all sorts of matters and I was playing guitar in the music group and leading the youth group.

  Sean, who had gone adrift after Antioch, quickly found a calling when he was asked by an Oklahoma City missionary, originally from India, to go back to India with him and win souls. Sean threw himself into the task with the same dedication he reserved for every other endeavor, raising money for the trip by preaching in churches all over the Midwest.

  In India, Sean discovered what he believed to be his true life’s calling. Crowds followed him wherever he went, and so, apparently, did miracles. He proudly recalled stories of dozens of healings at the meetings, held in places as large as stadiums and as small as single grass houses in out-of-the-way villages few Westerners had ever heard of.

  “I prayed for a woman with leprosy,” he told me breathlessly. “She came up and asked for prayer, so I laid my hands on her head and asked the interpreter what she needed prayer for. When he said ‘leprosy,’ my first instinct was to jump back and go wash my hands, but there were thousands of people there, so I just prayed for her.”

  The crowds were amazing, he said, as was the respect they showed for Americans.