Deadly Vows Page 7

  When Sean attended These Are They, it was he who was affected by the music. He, his wife and I were standing in the front row and the pastor was between Sean and me. About halfway through the song service, Sean bowed his head and his feet began to shuffle, arms thrown back behind him. He was standing next to a full-length window, and as he began to buck and dance more wildly, for a second I thought there was a very real chance he might just dive through the window and onto the ground outside.

  The pastor, however, had it under control. Without even so much as looking Sean’s way, he simply shot out his right hand and grabbed Sean by the back of his braided leather belt, and as Sean began to hoot, holler and hop around as he danced, he remained safely tethered to the pastor’s arm until the excitement began to wane.

  When he made his way to the stage, Sean was in rare form. It’s hard not to preach loudly in a black Pentecostal church, and harder still not to find yourself half-singing most of your sermon as the Hammond B-3 organ (this one played by a man I only ever knew as Deacon) vamps in the background, almost forcing you to sing your sermon. Sean was no exception. He looked as out-of-place as it is possible for one to look, his skinny, white frame clad in flawlessly pressed khakis, fancy Roper boots poking out beneath.

  But as he began to preach, he couldn’t have been more at home, and as the congregation’s encouraging shouts rose in harmony with Sean’s sermon, their enthusiasm pulled more enthusiasm out of him, growing louder, more powerful, more lyrical as the congregation began to—as Sean later put it—draw the sermon out of him.

  “Good preaching needs to be received by the congregation to become great preaching,” Sean once told me after his These Are They experience. “It’s like electricity. It’s always there, but until something closes the circuit, it doesn’t flow; it just sits there. Black churches let it flow. They draw it out of you.”

  And they certainly drew it out of Sean.

  “Let me tell you something,” he preached. “The problem with us not getting into the spirit today and worshiping God is because we are far too religious. You read in the Old Testament when the sacrifices came so often that soon God got sick of them. He didn’t want to smell the burnt fat any longer. He didn’t want to smell the perfumes they put on and all those things they did. He was sick of it, he was tired of it. He said ‘these sacrifices that you make, they make me sick because they don’t come from your heart but from that foul, stinking spirit of religion. It’s all over you people and I don’t want the sacrifices anymore!’ It’s time we go ahead and take off that cloak of religion too and find out whether we want to serve God or just come to church for social purposes.”

  That kind of preaching resonated with the congregation, and they were on their feet most of the sermon. Later, Sean confessed that the experience, which should have been exhausting, was instead rejuvenating. He and I often discussed ways we could get the passion from black churches to somehow transfer over to white churches—or better yet, to find a way to integrate the two—but we were unable to settle on ways to make that happen.

  Two years later, I moved back to Muskogee, Oklahoma, and took a job as a copy editor at the daily newspaper there while pastoring a small church furnished with pews donated by Jake, Sean’s uncle who pastored the church in Locust Grove. When I had first moved, I had absolutely no money and I moved into the back room of the church, where Sean’s father came to install a shower.

  I thanked him profusely; he pretended it was nothing.

  “When you’re rich, just let me be your limo driver,” he said with characteristic deadpan Goff humor. The entire Goff family have always shown themselves to be generous nearly to a fault. Anytime someone was in need, some member of the Goff family was there to reach out to them and help in any way they could, never asking for accolades or any physical thing in return. They did it out of what I perceived to be the true Christian spirit: simply because it was the right thing to do.

  Sean came to Oklahoma and preached at my church, leaving a lasting impression on some of the congregation members.

  “He was just so anointed,” Moya Barnoskie said years later. I had known Moya since high school, when her father had been my martial arts instructor, and now her husband was moving quickly to become my assistant pastor. “Sean’s preaching was amazing. He was just incredible, so loud, so powerful.”

  She also remembered Sean’s young wife, who was “so quiet and nice.”

  Over the years, the Goffs and the Barnoskies kept in touch, Moya said, and Sean would fill them in about the ministry trips he was taking, the preaching he was doing, the healings that were happening through his ministry and other details. They became friends with Sean’s younger brother too, and still visit with him to this day.

  But it was Sean who left the most lasting impression, Moya said.

  “I couldn’t tell you what he was preaching about now,” she said. “But I still remember how powerful the sermon was. It wasn’t something you could just forget.”

  Even with the preaching help, my tiny church struggled to survive; the congregation members were desperately poor and had no extra money to give to a church, so even as attendance swelled, money was scarce.

  Sean, meanwhile, had been hired as a writer for Morris Cerullo, a big-time televangelist, and Sean had moved to San Diego, where he was making more money than he ever had before. He telephoned me one day when I was thinking about closing the church for lack of money.

  “We don’t have a church here in San Diego,” he said out of the blue, “so we will send out tithes to your church.”

  “Tithes” means 10 percent, and true to his word, Sean sent a check for 10 percent of his income every time he got paid. It was the difference between my little church making the rent so it could continue to reach out to the poor or having to close the doors for good. It was above and beyond the call of friendship—he could have found somewhere else to give the money, had he been so inclined, but he reached out to help me on something we probably both knew wouldn’t last. The vast majority of the time I knew Sean, that’s who he was—a compassionate man who helped everyone he could every time he had the opportunity.

  It was a lesson I never forgot: generosity for generosity’s sake is a virtue to be aspired to. Sean never stopped reaching out to me. At the newspaper, I was making three hundred and fifty dollars a week, which added up to just eighteen thousand dollars a year. I had married in the early fall of 1995—Sean had flown in from San Diego to officiate at the wedding—and money was tight. My wife and I celebrated the infrequent times we had enough money to eat out at a fast food restaurant, and even then, we often could only order off the children’s menu. The house we were living in had very little insulation, so in the winter we had to stuff blankets in the cracks in the walls to keep the cold air out.

  In the late fall of 1995, I asked for a raise, but the editor said the money just wasn’t there. I didn’t feel guilty, therefore, using the newspaper’s long-distance service after deadline late at night to dial up to the Internet and e-mail my friend in San Diego.

  “You have to come here, Leif,” I read in Sean’s message after the characteristic “You’ve Got Mail” chime. “San Diego is paradise. And the ministry is starting a newspaper; it needs an editor.”

  I gathered up clippings of my work and typed up a résumé to send to San Diego. A week later, I was hired for thirty thousand dollars a year—plus a two-thousand-dollar moving stipend, which was more money than I had ever seen at one time in my life.

  At the time, I considered this salary to be rock star money, so I put in my two weeks’ notice—maybe a little more smugly than I had intended—sold my old pickup truck and rented a truck to drive to San Diego for my new job, editor of Morris Cerullo’s new newspaper, GVA Today, shamelessly fashioned after USA Today (the styling got a quick makeover after Gannett, USA Today’s parent company, sent a sternly-worded letter to the ministry).

  When I arrived in San Diego, Sean offered to carpool to work with me if I could find
an apartment in Chula Vista, a bedroom community just north of Tijuana. We began to commute together daily. I immediately noticed a change in Sean.

  The strict moral absolutism of his Midwestern Pentecostal upbringing had changed in subtle ways. Suddenly, Sean liked to talk about sex, something I had never heard him mention in all the years I had known him. On one commute, out of the blue, Sean said something that left me speechless.

  “I gave her two orgasms last night,” he said, matter-of-factly. “That’s a personal record but I’m not going to stop there. I’m going for three next time.”

  I had absolutely no response. Sex had always been an intensely personal subject, strictly forbidden in fundamentalist thinking. Though husbands and wives were expected to engage in sex, they were definitely not expected to talk about it with other people. There were still arguments going on in theological circles about whether oral sex between a husband and wife was okay, about whether condoms were thwarting God’s will and whether masturbation—even that word was deemed too risqué and never used—was a sin. In that kind of repressed environment, two buddies talking about sex was unthinkable, yet almost from the beginning of my time in San Diego Sean made it one of his favorite subjects of conversation.

  Sean’s relationship with his wife had started changing as well, with his “disciplining” of her becoming more public, less shielded behind closed doors.

  One Sunday afternoon, my then-wife and I had eaten lunch with Sean and his wife after church. Then we decided to go back to their apartment in Chula Vista to watch football. As we were ascending the stairs to their third-floor apartment, Sean and his wife began tag-teaming the telling of a story. They were disagreeing mildly on some of the details and finally Sean’s wife said, “Sean, just shut up and let me tell the story.”

  And, shockingly to me at the time, because I had been the only one who had seen firsthand the way Sean and his wife truly interacted with each other, Sean did “shut up” and let her tell the rest of the story. But when we got to the apartment, the storm clouds converged.

  Sean pointed his finger dramatically back toward the master bedroom of the tiny two-bedroom apartment, which, though furnished almost spartanly, was still chock full of the trappings of an Oklahoma house crammed into the compact lifestyle of the super-crowded beach communities of the West Coast. As he gestured toward the bedroom, he said to his wife with a pinched, barely controlled fury: “Go to your room!”

  The expression on her face fell and her porcelain complexion drained. Her shoulders slumped, her head bowed and she immediately cast her eyes down to the floor, turned and slinked off.

  “Excuse me for a second,” Sean said, and bounded in gazelle-like strides toward the bedroom, slamming the door behind himself when he reached it. Uncomfortably, we stared at each other in silence as muffled sounds—overwhelmingly Sean’s voice—emanated from the closed room.

  Then silence.

  Finally, after several beats too long—we had been quietly debating sneaking out of the apartment so they could handle their marital issues in privacy—Sean came out of the bedroom, the weird smile/grimace that always adorned his face when he was angry displayed in full effect. Behind him, shoulders still slumped, face still drained, his wife followed silently. Her eyes were red, as if she had been crying.

  “My wife has something she wants to say to you,” Sean told us through the grimace/smile.

  “I’m sorry I put you two in such an awkward position,” she said. I’m not sure if my mouth dropped open, but it felt as if it wanted to. “I shouldn’t have disrespected my husband like that.”

  What do you say to something like that? “It’s okay” seems like you might be agreeing with the chastisement she had just endured at the hands of someone who should be just fine with his wife wanting to tell a story. In pained silence, we simply didn’t respond to her apology for putting us in an awkward position.

  “Awkward” was the right way to describe the rest of the afternoon, and after we left, we talked about nothing else for days. For the first time that I could remember, Sean had let his inner controlling anger show to someone besides just me.

  But displays like that were still rare in the early days after I moved to San Diego. Soon, Cerullo was demanding that Sean and I always attend the monthly creative meetings in his office, which were where the ideas, plans and directions for the worldwide ministry were generated. It was an honored position to be in.

  “There are people who have worked here for twenty years and have never even met MC in person,” Sean said at lunch during a break in one of the all-day meetings, where we were eating Thai food. “MC” is what people around the office informally called Cerullo. “We have just been here a little while and we are in his top advisors’ meeting.”

  Cerullo counted on us for ideas and it became quickly apparent that the ideas had better be fleshed out before the meeting. Amateur hour was for other people. MC did not appreciate his time being wasted. Sean and I both thrived in that atmosphere. We became closer than we had been in Oklahoma and our daily commute gave us time to grow even closer.

  Chapter 7

  WORLDWIDE MINISTRY

  Television ministry is a strange animal. The phenomenon, popularized by Tulsa evangelist Oral Roberts in the 1950s and 60s, has created superstars out of otherwise obscure ministers and has spawned a litany of scandals, from the Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker embezzlement scandal of the 1980s to preacher Peter Popoff using wireless radios to “prophesy” to believers who came to him to hear from God.

  Then there are the sex scandals, such as televangelist Jimmy Swaggart’s penchant for hookers and anti-homosexual crusader Ted Haggard’s closet gay lover exposing his secret life to the media.

  Through television, ministers believe—correctly—that they can reach a much larger and more diverse audience than if they preached every single day of the year from coast to coast. With one well-chosen sermon, a mid-level minister can become a superstar almost overnight by broadcasting that sermon on the many Christian networks that seem to inhabit every other channel on late-night television. But those time slots aren’t free or cheap. Most ministers must pay the networks that broadcast their shows, and therein lies the inherent problem.

  Moderately successful ministers embark optimistically on their first tentative broadcasts with well-intentioned hopes of reaching the masses with the message they believe God has put in their hearts to share with the world. If the message is good, feedback starts coming in from people all over the nation requesting prayer, more information or both. Encouraged, the minister knows he needs a follow-up message to transmit but that means paying the broadcast fees again.

  So he raises money by encouraging listeners to donate to the ministry to help ensure it reaches as many viewers as it can possibly reach. Soon, the money that viewers mail in from the appeals on the TV broadcasts isn’t enough to pay the ever-increasing broadcast bills; the minister needs a steadier, more predictable income to ensure future broadcasts can safely be embarked upon, so he starts a newsletter to be periodically distributed to those who have already responded. But the minister is busy ministering and he doesn’t have time to write the newsletter, so he hires people like Sean and me to write the newsletter for him.

  But then he needs to raise enough money to pay for the broadcasts and pay for the writers’ salaries. Then he needs graphic artists. Printers. Postage. Mailing lists. People to open the letters sent from people who agree with the messages. People to count the money. People to assemble the prayer requests. Accountants. So, to raise more money, he starts sending out a monthly letter to all his “partners”—the people who have responded—expressing the need for more funds. To maximize the return from those letters, he personalizes each one using complicated programs that reach deep into databases that store information about the “partners” and enable the letters that get sent to each one to be personalized enough to touch on their hot-button issues. Usually, the big companies that write such letters charge a percentage of t
he return on the letters, plus, now that the minister has gotten so busy, he needs extra incentives to encourage people to give to support the vast infrastructure that seems to have sprung up around him from nowhere. So he starts offering trinkets—a “prayer cloth,” water from the Dead Sea, “anointing” oil—that promise to carry miracles directly from the minister’s hands to the hands of the partners after they have sent in a gift that reached the predetermined threshold amount to trigger the sending of the trinket.

  Before he knows what has happened, the ministry is a big business, running with the daily purpose of raising enough money to keep itself going. And somewhere in the jumble of newsletters, glossy “crusade” posters, personalized letters, DVDs, maps, oil, water, cloths and other junk, the message the minister initially felt so moved to preach becomes lost. Now he is responsible for all these people and that means he needs to raise money almost all the time. And as the head of such a big, successful business, shouldn’t he reap some of the benefits of all his hard work? Of course. So he buys a luxury car—but nothing too flashy, because he doesn’t want the partners to think he’s living high on the hog. He buys a big house through a shell company. Then a vacation house. Then, because he’s well-known, he can’t fly commercial airlines anymore for fear that the partners who have fostered his lifestyle might actually corner him and force him into talking to them. So he issues an appeal to the partners: we need to be good stewards of God’s money and flying commercial is too expensive; it’s a waste of God’s money, so he needs to buy a private jet. If you believe in the message of this ministry, won’t you donate for God’s jet so we don’t waste his precious money?