Part 2

Another Church

It’s Saturday. The alarm you had set goes off and you have no strength to get out of bed. You pull the blankets off your body inch by inch, first exposing the frame of your head then down past your throat. You mutter a word, a magic word to break the spell of sleep. And it works. You manage to get the blankets halfway past your knee. You are still in the ill-fitting navy blue suit you had on during your last intercessory session.

All you need is the pair of socks you haven’t overused and your shoes that probably carry tons of dust gathered from your door to door visits. You don’t mind the shoes, at least you have shoes. Jesus had sandals and walked even longer distances. You say the first hallelujah of the day, it sounds like sleep.

You reach for the Bible. A black leathered cover with a peeling spine. You know what the bible has done since your father; self-declared Bishop Marinus gave it to you as a gift the day you accepted Jesus as your personal savior. You had reportedly wandered into a congregation, your trousers soiled and a half emptied bottle of Vodka in your hands. You had sung your way up the dais where your father was preaching deliverance to a handful of believers. You don’t remember any of these of course. The power of the gospel, as your father, the Bishop told you later, swept you off your feet and for a moment you would pass for dead. The watchman who had got saved earlier that day had carried you off under a shade where you would wake up after three hours as a changed man. You weren’t alone. You remember that.

Your hands go for the bible that lies open on the peeling table next to your bed. Your other suits are hanging from a beam nailed to the ceiling beam. A white six piece you received as a gift from a man you had prayed his daughter out of Tuberculosis that wouldn’t hear the drugs. A fading black suit your church had bought you a couple of years ago when you got ordained as Bishop by guess who, yourself. And a tuxedo you wore under whichever suit you chose to darn. Your thumb reaches for the Bible first, and then the finger with your wedding ring on it. The last page of Genesis is lying gorgeously next to the first leaf of Exodus. You know this Bible too well. It has been a companion throughout your battle winning souls. It is a weapon and life is a battle. There are days you feel the scriptures don’t sound the same read from any other Bible other than your warrior. Your Bible is a warrior. You have fixed families with this Bible, You have lifted homes from poverty, you have saved people from death by a whisker, and you have prayed fertility into barren wombs and above all, saved souls from going to hell. There are verses you know by heart. 

You sit up on the bedside, palms crossed and elbows on your thighs. You are reading something about being chosen to fight the good battle. You read about Joshua and courage. Have I not commanded you to be strong and courageous?

You look up at the ceiling. The middle part has been leaking lately but that isn’t what you see. You are seeing a revelation. You are seeing God showing you a sign. God is talking to you because you are his buddy and He doesn’t trust anybody else. You don’t blink. It’s like a trance. 

You remind yourself of John the Baptist waiting for a sign. Looking up for God to confirm he had just baptized the Messiah. You feel the dove over your head. It is real. Your entire house is full of light and you know it is not the bulb over your head.  It’s something else. A portal to a world everyone wants to go to.

Then you start shaking like one of your believers who had epilepsy of course before you and your badass Bible touched his soul. You know the feeling because you have experienced it before. It is the same as what you felt the day you received salvation. It feels like an orgasm. Spiritual orgasm. You feel angels running to your arms and you stretch them so wide you touch the framed photograph on your wall. It sways side to side and settles. You don’t notice this. You are not in this world. Your spirit has briefly detached from your body. You see a vision. Nothing close to Elijah’s basket and woman but it means a lot to you. It is a special vision you can’t wait to tell your church about. This is your all time high since you started feeling these moments. 

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A few minutes to your first service that day. Your knees are sore but you are happy. Happy are those who are afflicted here on earth for they will find comfort in heaven. You smile despite the fact that you are always in the line of fire, casting out demon after demon. And you ask them their names before ordering them out of the body. That’s what happened to you the last day you tasted alcohol. Your father had pressed this same Bible on your head and watched you lose your balance. He had asked the demon tormenting you to identify himself. Not in the same way you were asked to identify yourself at OR Tambo when you visited South Africa to preach the word. A harsh, compelling way, like you are commanding a tree to move. And the demon said a name and fled your body. You don’t remember that, you were just told. Most of these things were told to you. But there are a lot you have seen yourself.

The believers embrace each other as they push and pull the quaking iron sheet gate at the entrance. The gate swings open after every few seconds and someone else walks in. Sometimes a middle aged woman howls a child along or a bald man approaching his forties tucking a KJV under his armpit. An old shoe and a trimmed car tire make the spine, the hinge on which the gate swings in and out. 

The church is a spacious makeshift structure, iron sheet all through. Something close to someone wearing denim dungaree. The windows are made by cutting out the roofing sheets that make the wall. The door is a bigger version of the window, high enough to let in the tallest believer. The church’s emblem hangs lazily above the heads of the believers passing through the door. Another wooden cardboard is nailed next to the emblem. More like an afterthought. On it the letters for the word Headquarters run in a spiral manner to form a bum, like Mount Zion. 

You are proud of this church. There are only enough seats for the first thirty congregants but you are proud of this church regardless. It has changed lives. It has shown the world that everything is possible. The entire church fits between two rumbling flats that make it look dwarfed and its roof dilapidated. 

You smile because you remember the battles you have had waged against you since this church. Because you have won each. Nothing stands in the way of the Lord. Not even the hands of wicked men. You remember the day the County Council brought a bulldozer. It slept in the yard over the Friday night waiting to tear down God’s dwelling the following day. Your church was an illegal structure. You remember how none of that shook you a bit. You told the church that you have prayed over it. The following morning, the morning of demolition, you remember fondly how the engines failed and the Bulldozer couldn’t start. God doesn’t give a damn about authorities. Isn’t God the one who plants all these authorities and uproots them at will? The church had jubilantly received the news about the failed Engine and that’s how you moved your Sabbath day from Sunday to Saturday- the day of failed demolitions. And that’s how you came up with this Unshakable Faith Ministries International. 

You are excited. The church is almost full. You know that the Government has banned all church gatherings due to some pandemic you don’t believe in but again you know it’s God who plants and uproots Authorities at will. You are the son of Marinus, the self-declared Bishop who saved an entire village from Alcoholism. Your ancestors probably trace back to Zebedee and you have had a one on one with Moses. Nothing scares you. Not a pandemic definitely. 

You are going to tell them about the ban on face masks. You can’t let the devil triumph inside the Church of God. You are going to remind them about the new prayer line since most of them still send the prayer request fee to the old number that you gave to your wife who now runs the Soweto branch of your church. You are going to speak about the leadership wrangles, specifically warn the new believer who has constantly shown rebellion since coming in. There is going to be a moment of testimonies and you can’t wait to hear another healing testimony involving you and your bible. Then you will saunter to the dais and clear your throat. You will remind them not to live in flesh but in spirit. You will read them the verse on courage and strength and tell them about the revelation.

You saw a sign earlier, you will say, and they will see you configure, your face turning white. They believe you are chosen by God. Anointed to be precise.  And the sign was about one seed that falls on a desert.

“Everybody walks on it with boots and sandals.”

They now will watch you burst with some strange strength. You are the closest they have been to their father. 

“But the seed grows into a tree and even then some people try to cut down the tree but for some reasons they fail, miserably”

The congregation starts to wail jubilantly. 

“The tree produces fruits and seeds.  One seed after the other, the desert becomes a forest. Full of trees and shrubs.”

With that they will look at you, all puzzled.  They will want to know what the sign means. As if it’s not as obvious as it sounds. And you will explain.

“This church here is the first seed, the first tree. The Lord is telling me that this church should be reaching out to the world. But how do we do that?”

They are going to look amazed at your spiritualism. They will ponder over the sign and the question.

“How do we reach out to the world? How do we do God’s will? Tomorrow we will start contributing to a special account. We will build another church in a month.”

You mean it. They believe you.