TWO

Catching Fire

WELCOME BACK, PASTOR CYMBALA,” people said when they saw me that morning. “Did you have a good rest in Florida? How’s your cough?”

I told them my cough was much better, but inside, I couldn’t wait to tell them something far more important. Early in the service I said, “Brothers and sisters, I really feel that I’ve heard from God about the future of our church. While I was away, I was calling out to God to help us—to help me—understand what he wants most from us. And I believe I’ve heard an answer.

“It’s not fancy or profound or spectacular. But I want to say to you today with all the seriousness I can muster: From this day on, the prayer meeting will be the barometer of our church. What happens on Tuesday night will be the gauge by which we will judge success or failure because that will be the measure by which God blesses us.

“If we call upon the Lord, he has promised in his Word to answer, to bring the unsaved to himself, to pour out his Spirit among us. If we don’t call upon the Lord, he has promised nothing—nothing at all. It’s as simple as that. No matter what I preach or what we claim to believe in our heads, the future will depend upon our times of prayer.

“This is the engine that will drive the church. Yes, I want you to keep coming on Sundays—but Tuesday night is what it’s really all about. Carol and I have set our course, and we hope you’ll come along with us.”

A minister from Australia (or perhaps it was New Zealand) happened to be present that morning—a rare occurrence. I introduced him and invited him to say a few words. He walked to the front and made just one comment:

“I heard what your pastor said. Here’s something to think about:

“You can tell how popular a church is by who comes on Sunday morning.

“You can tell how popular the pastor or evangelist is by who comes on Sunday night.

“But you can tell how popular Jesus is by who comes to the prayer meeting.”

And with that, he walked off the platform. That was all. I never saw him again.

THE NEW BEGINNING

IF MY ANNOUNCEMENT to that congregation sounds strange and overbearing, consider that it was not a whole lot different from what Charles Haddon Spurgeon, the great British pulpiteer, had said in a sermon almost exactly a hundred years before:

The condition of the church may be very accurately gauged by its prayer meetings. So is the prayer meeting a grace-ometer, and from it we may judge of the amount of divine working among a people. If God be near a church, it must pray. And if he be not there, one of the first tokens of his absence will be a slothfulness in prayer.¹

That first Tuesday night, fifteen to eighteen people showed up. I had no agenda or program laid out; I just stood up and led the people in singing and praising God. Out of that came extended prayer. I felt a new sense of unity and love among us. God seemed to be knitting us together. I didn’t preach a typical sermon; there was new liberty to wait on God’s presence.

In the weeks that followed, answers to prayer became noticeable. New people gradually joined, with talents and skills that could help us. Unsaved relatives and total strangers began to show up. We started to think of ourselves as a “Holy Ghost emergency room” where people in spiritual trauma could be rescued. In most hospitals, the ER isn’t decorated as beautifully or fashionably as the rest of the building, but it’s very efficient in saving lives.

We were a prime example of what the great Scottish devotional writer Andrew Bonar wrote in 1853: “God likes to see His people shut up to this, that there is no hope but in prayer. Herein lies the Church’s power against the world.”²

So week after week, I kept encouraging the people to pray. And of course, as Samuel Chadwick said long ago, the greatest answer to prayer is more prayer.

We were not there to hear one another give voice to eloquent prayers; we were too desperate for that. We focused vertically, on God, rather than horizontally on one another. Much of the time we called out to the Lord as a group, all praying aloud in concert, a practice that continues to this day. At other times we would join hands in circles of prayer, or various people would speak up with a special burden to express.

The format of a prayer meeting is not nearly as important as its essence—touching the Almighty, crying out with one’s whole being. I have been in noisy prayer meetings that were mainly a show. I have been with groups in times of silent prayer that were deeply spiritual. The atmosphere of the meeting may vary; what matters most is that we encounter the God of the universe, not just each other.

I also began to ease up in the Sunday meetings and not control them so tightly with a microphone. The usual format—two songs, then announcements, special music by the choir, the offering, then the sermon, finally a benediction—was gradually laid aside as God began to loosen me up. I didn’t have to be so nervous or uptight—or phony. I had only been protecting myself out of fear.

After all, people weren’t hungry for fancy sermons or organizational polish. They just wanted love. They wanted to know that God could pick them up and give them a second chance.

In those early days on Atlantic Avenue, as people drew near to the Lord, received the Spirit’s fullness, and rekindled their first love for God, they naturally began to talk about it on their jobs, in their apartment buildings, at family gatherings. Soon they were bringing new people.

From that day to the present, more than two decades later, there has never been a season of decline in the church, thank God. By his grace we have never had a faction rise up and decide to split away. God has continued to send people who need help; often I can’t even find out how they learned of us.

The offerings improved to the point that we could make some building repairs. We replaced the tumbledown pews with fiberglass chairs that locked together. More important, however, people began to sense the presence of the Lord in that humble place. They felt loved. Hardened people would come in and break down even during the singing. The choir began to grow.

SOUNDS OF REJOICING

CAROL HAD LOVED MUSIC from the time she was a teenager. She came by it honestly—her father had been an opera singer before his conversion, and her grandmother was a pianist.

Growing up around the city meant that she had absorbed the sounds of many cultures. Inside her head, the classics blended with black gospel, traditional Scandinavian hymns with contemporary worship choruses and Caribbean rhythms. At the age of only sixteen or seventeen, a dream had entered her heart of directing a large choir someday—not a stiff, formal choir, but a choir of the common people.

Carol did not have a competent accompanist at the church, so she had to play the piano and lead the group simultaneously. She doesn’t know how to read music, so she figured out the songs in her head and then taught the group by rote. Even so, the number of singers began to climb, eventually reaching fifty or so. The platform was not nearly large enough to hold them; they would just stand all across the front and sing, overwhelming the small building with their sound.

Practices were held on Friday nights. That may surprise readers who find that other weekend events would be too stiff a competition for people’s time. But the urban schedule is different; people are too rushed during the week with their jobs and the long commutes on trains, buses, and subways. They finally relax when Friday evening comes, knowing they don’t have to get up early the next day.

Carol would begin with a half hour of prayer. Often a spirit of worship fell on the group. Someone might volunteer a testimony or feel impressed to read Scripture. Carol might offer a short exhortation. Many nights there was more prayer and worship than there was practicing; sometimes the choir never got around to singing at all.

This experience put people in a whole different frame of mind. The choir wasn’t just coming up with two “specials” to sing before the sermon; rather, the members were engaged in full-scale ministry.

The band members were as untrained as Carol. Joey Vazquez, who became the bass player, learned the instrument “on the job.” He had been plunking around on a bass at a friend’s house one day; at choir practice the next night, his friend jokingly said that Joey knew how to play. Carol assumed the friend was serious and put Joey to work. That was the beginning of his career as a bass player; he is still with the church today.

Our drummer, Michael Archibald, a man from Trinidad, has likewise never had lessons. Jonathan Woodby, our organist (and one of the best in America, we think), cannot read music. Yet these two have performed on two Grammy Award-winning albums. The choir played a crucial role when we started hosting monthly rallies in cooperation with Teen Challenge, a ministry to drug addicts and gang members that was started in Brooklyn in 1958 by David Wilkerson. Together with Teen Challenge, we rented a big Baptist church. For the first rally we advertised the film The Cross and the Switchblade, which tells the conversion story of the notorious gang leader Nicky Cruz.

The crowd was so large we had to show the film three times that night so that everyone would get a chance to see it.

For the next rally, Nicky himself came to speak. It was amazing; here he was, preaching in the very building where years before, out on the steps, he had knocked out some Italian guy, ready to kill him if the cops hadn’t showed up.

Nicky’s story was a great inspiration to me. He was a symbol of things to come in our church: God taking hopeless, even crazy people and changing them. I knew that a lot of churches gave lip service to the idea that God can do anything. But we needed to have real faith that anyone who walked in, regardless of his or her problems, could become a trophy of God’s grace. Ever since that night, Nicky has been a close friend of mine and a frequent guest at the Tabernacle.

As more churches got involved in the rallies, Carol formed a multiracial “New York Challenge Choir” made up of people from the Tabernacle plus any others who wanted to sing—eighty or more voices altogether.

It was about this time also that Carol wrote her first song. She took the Christmas carol “Joy to the World” and created a new melody for it. Again, she didn’t know how to write it down, but simply taught it to the choir by rote.

A COMMUNITY OF LOVE AND PRAYER

WE NEVER KNEW WHO might come to Christ at the Brooklyn Tabernacle. There were junkies, prostitutes, and homosexuals. But lost lawyers, business types, and bus drivers turned to the Lord there, too. We welcomed them all.

There were Latinos, African Americans, Caribbean Americans, whites—you name it. Once people were energized by the Holy Spirit, they began to see other races as God’s creation. Instead of railing at homosexuals, we began to weep over them. People began driving thirty or forty minutes from Long Island. The one—and perhaps only—advantage of our location in downtown Brooklyn is that excellent mass transit was available, which meant that people from Manhattan, Queens, the Bronx, and elsewhere could reach us easily on the subways and buses. By the time we grew to 150 or 175 on Sunday morning, the prayer meeting was up to 100. There was life, joy, a sense of family, and love. When a meeting ended, people weren’t in a hurry to leave; they lingered and prayed and talked to one another.

There was no air-conditioning, so on hot summer nights we would have all the windows open and people even sitting on the sills. One Sunday night in August, when it was 90 degrees outside and probably 100 degrees in the building, I felt oddly impressed to lead “Silent Night, Holy Night” as an expression of love to Jesus. A drunk was passing by and stopped to listen. In his confused brain, he said to himself, This drinking problem of mine is getting totally out of hand. Now I’m hearing Christmas carols. I’d better go in this church and get some help! The ushers were there to meet him and minister to him.

The mentally disturbed could drop by as well. A fellow named Austin, recently released from an institution, started coming to church. One Sunday he said something vulgar to one of our women. When I called him on Tuesday and warned him that this wouldn’t be tolerated, he said, “Oh yeah? I’m going to come take care of you with my ‘boys.’” He was a huge man, so I didn’t laugh.

I replied, “Austin, you might take care of me, but not with your ‘boys’—the way you act, I doubt you have any ‘boys.’”

I alerted the ushers that if he showed up again, they should call me—and also immediately call the police. That very night, Austin came back. I left the prayer meeting and went out to talk with him, stalling for time. Soon the police burst through the door and took him away. They wanted me to press charges, but I declined. Instead, I went back in and rejoined the prayer meeting. Episodes as strange as this became a regular part of ministering in this section of the city.

The offerings, as one might expect, were never great because of the kind of community we served, characterized by single mothers, people on public assistance, people seeking to become free of drugs. But people who were settled and secure were coming, too, who didn’t mind the socioeconomic mix.

Because I had been a basketball player, it never dawned on me to evaluate people on the basis of color. If you could play, you could play. In America it would appear that there is more openness, acceptance, and teamwork in the gym than in the church of Jesus Christ.

SPACE PROBLEMS

BY 1977 MORE PEOPLE were trying to fit into the pews on Sunday morning and Sunday night than there was room for. Down the block was a YWCA with an auditorium that could seat 400 to 500 people. We were able to rent it on Sundays and began lugging our sound equipment and other supplies down there every week. The windows were painted shut, and there was no air-conditioning. Often we had to sweep out the place on Sunday morning before we could set up chairs for church.

But at least we had space to use. We rented the YWCA for two years. Some of the earliest memories of church for our two younger children, Susan and James, are in that building. I remember glancing up during the singing one Sunday and seeing, to my horror, my acrobatic preschool daughter turning 360-degree flips on some parallel bars over on the edge of the hall. So much for the “perfect pastor’s kids”!

When Lanny Wolfe, a well-known gospel singer and songwriter, visited a service, he was captivated by the choir’s sound, now up to one hundred voices. He encouraged Carol to write more. “You have an eclectic feel that’s totally different,” he said. “The songs you write are unlike anything I would do, or Bill Gaither, or anyone else.” Lanny’s encouragement meant a great deal to both of us.

Since then, of course, Carol’s music has gone far and wide across the country and is sung in all kinds of churches, whatever the style of their worship. After selling one million units of Brooklyn Tabernacle sheet music, Word Music gave Carol an award in 1994. Ironically, the Tabernacle has not bought a single piece of her music—it wouldn’t do any good for a choir that doesn’t read music.

Meeting in the YWCA was a temporary solution, at best, to the overcrowding. We purchased a lot across the street in the hope of erecting a real church building one day. It required a big step of faith, but God provided the funds.

We scheduled a groundbreaking ceremony, excited about starting a new building, a permanent home. Would you believe that on that special Sunday, it rained so hard we couldn’t go outdoors to put a shovel in the ground? Disappointed, we packed ourselves back into the Y auditorium that evening.

But in that meeting God clearly spoke to us that it wasn’t the ground across the street he wanted to break. Instead, he would break our hearts and build his church on that foundation.

The downpour, as it turned out, was providential. A few months later, a large 1,400-seat theater on Flatbush Avenue, the main north-south artery of Brooklyn, became available for only $150,000.

We were able to sell the lot at a profit. We needed to sell the run-down Atlantic Avenue building as well in order to buy the theater. Some pastors came to look at our old place and appeared serious about buying it. We agreed on a price—only to find out later they hadn’t even tried to secure a mortgage. By then we were in danger of losing our option on the theater.

All our dreams were about to come crashing down. At a Tuesday night prayer meeting we laid the problem before God, weeping and pleading for a last-minute rescue of some kind.

On Wednesday afternoon the doorbell at the church rang. I went downstairs to answer. There stood a well-dressed stranger, who, it turned out, was a Kuwaiti businessman. He walked in and looked around while I held my breath lest he look too closely at crooked walls, dingy bathrooms, and questionable plumbing. The basement ceiling was so low I feared he would hit his head on one of the pipes that hung down.

“What are you asking for this building?” he said at last.

I cleared my throat and answered weakly, “Ninety-five thousand.”

He paused a moment and then said, “That’s fair.”

I was shocked!

He continued, “We have a deal.”

“Uh, well, how long will it take you to make arrangements at the bank?” I was still worried that our option on the Flatbush property would expire before we could close this deal.

“No bank, nothing,” he answered abruptly. “Just get your lawyer to call my lawyer—here’s the name and phone number. Cash deal.” And with that, he was gone.

Once again, our prayer had been answered in a surprising way.

God had formed a core of people who wanted to pray, who believed that nothing was too big for him to handle. No matter what roadblock we faced, no matter what attack came against us, no matter how wild the city became in the late seventies—as cocaine arrived on top of heroin, and then crack cocaine on top of that—God could still change people and deliver them from evil. He was building his church in a tough neighborhood, and as long as people kept calling out for his blessing and help, he had fully committed himself to respond.