Prologue
Working the Crime Beat
I was driving on the wild frontier of gangsta-land, a place I'd learn to navigate by the sites where people got murdered. South Dallas always stayed crazy, and I was just getting used to the experience—the occasional kak-kak-kak of semiautomatic-weapon fire, the graffiti tags of the Trey-Five-Seven (.357) Crips, the distinctive choreography of drug dealing, with crack rocks passing invisibly from hand to hand in furtive motions that I came to recognize from afar.
I was twenty-seven years old, white, and quite conspicuous in black South Dallas the evening in late April 1990 when I set out to find a different kind of story for the Dallas Times Herald. Since starting a job two months earlier as a crime reporter, I'd been getting to know the roughest parts of the city, places like this. It was nothing like the small Wisconsin town where I grew up.
I'd tell myself I wasn't scared, but I think I was driving too fast to know for sure. This time I wasn't chasing flashing lights toward Bexar Street, hoping to get there before the witnesses and walking wounded had melted away in the dark. Instead, I was looking for the scene of a miracle.
There would be no crime-scene tape marking the spot. It was just me in my little car, prowling the streets and looking for a spiritual outpost. I had no idea what it would look like; all I knew was there had to be a church in this part of the inner city where people came searching for a supernatural breakthrough. I had decided it would be impossible to live in this crumbling, seemingly godforsaken territory without clinging to some shred of hope that things could get better. I was determined to find the place people go when despair drives them to seek a miracle.
I turned a corner and entered a neighborhood with all the familiar signs: slender boys with darting eyes, standing like pickets on the corner, beckoning to people in cars that were slowly passing through. I steered around potholes and broken glass in the street and looked past the drug sentries for evidence of light and life in the neighborhood's churches. You'd find Baptists on one corner and Holy Sanctifieds on the other, with a House of Prayer for All People wedged in between. They stood as silent witnesses while hell swarmed all around them.
The truth is, I really didn't know what I was looking for. I just knew I couldn't leave South Dallas until I found it.
All this began with a lie, a made-up story idea that I pitched to my editors at the newspaper. See, there are these preachers in the ghetto who pray for crack-cocaine addicts, and people are supposedly getting miraculously "healed." And oh, I know a bunch of these preachers.
The best you could say in my defense is that I thought about the story so much that it became real to me. Before moving to Dallas, I had lived in Belfast, Northern Ireland, where the Troubles erupted regularly into fire bombings, shootings, and retaliatory acts between working-class Catholics and Protestants. I had gone to the province of Ulster to write the story of a terrorist who found God and was now trying to lead his former enemies to reconciliation. I learned while living in Belfast that among certain types of Christians, unexplainable things were almost commonplace. You just had to know where to look.
My previous work as a crime reporter at the Seattle Times had led me to believe that miracle-working preachers could be found in any major city. In Dallas in 1990, the crack epidemic was leaving a trail of wreckage—of neighborhoods gone to hell in a swath of murder and ruin. Thanks to my experiences in Belfast and Seattle, I had come up with a simple theorem: where desperation multiplied, there you would find God.
At the Dallas Times Herald we were always looking for new angles to pursue in reporting the crack-cocaine story. I needed something bigger than yet another shooting, drug raid, or body found in the street. Why not make my mark at the paper by uncovering the miraculous?
Here, then, was the problem: I didn't know any preachers who fit this description. There is a game that newspaper reporters play: you invest as little work as possible before pitching a story to your editor. That way, if your editor rejects the idea, you haven't wasted too much effort. I mentioned my story idea of supernatural healing, and to my surprise and secret horror, the editors seized on it immediately. They scheduled the story for Sunday A-1. I had just a few days to find my mythical ministers and write a lengthy feature story about them in time for the early edition, the "bulldog."
That's why I was cruising aimlessly through South Dallas. As evening moved quickly toward night, I was way more scared of my editors than I was of the ghetto. I passed dozens of churches without stopping. If the lights weren't on, I kept rolling. I eventually turned onto a one-block street, Brigham Lane, and saw two churches, one on each corner. The first seemed inconsequential, with a sagging roof and handmade sign. But at the other end of the block stood a tidy, brick-walled structure. I noted the affiliation: Church of God in Christ. Black Pentecostals. Holy rollers. I aimed for the far corner.
I had my music cranked, a soca artist from Tobago named Shadow, who had an insidiously hummable tune, "Tabanka." It has something to do with the sickness you feel when you're hopelessly attracted to someone. I craved the melody and syncopation of my beloved Caribbean music. All the plastic parts of my little Honda were rattling with the heavy bass line, and the noise helped to bury my nervousness.
I was driving past the scruffy-looking church when something intensely spiritual happened. I don't know how else to say this: God was in the car with me. I could feel his presence, a palpable thing that made my senses light up, even amid the dissonance of blaring soca. I might have been a tough-minded crime reporter, but I had recently reconnected with the faith of my childhood, and I was engaged to be married to a man who was a devout Christian. I was far from figuring things out but eager to investigate anything that might shed more light on questions about God's work on earth.
Is that really you, God? I thought. What else could I think? I turned the music down and pulled my car to the curb.
You want me to stop here, don't you? I said to myself and, I suppose, to God as well. Just then a girl popped out the front door of the dilapidated church. As the girl skipped down the sidewalk, I got out of my car, reporter's notebook in hand, and stopped her just short of the house that stood next-door.
"Do you believe in healing prayer?" I asked without introduction.
"Yes!" she said enthusiastically. She was brown-skinned, with pigtails, or so I recall. I don't remember very clearly anymore. I guessed she was about ten, but back then I wasn't good at estimating children's ages.
"Does your minister pray for drug addicts?" I asked.
"Yes!" she answered again.
"Are any getting healed?"
"Yes!"
I asked her to point out her pastor to me. At that moment a black man wearing a suit jacket and tie stepped outside the church's front door. Several church members were visible in the dim yellow light of the tiny foyer behind him. A thought flashed in my brain: Oh God, don't let him be one of those overbearing egotistical preachers. I'm not even sure where that objection came from--probably from a bad experience I'd had in my years as a reporter.
I walked over and introduced myself as a journalist. The pastor was Fredrick L. Eddington Sr. He was tall and I am not, and I remember he bent down slightly as he listened to me.
"Do you pray for crack addicts?" I asked. Might as well get right to the point.
"Yes," the pastor said.
"Are they getting healed?"
The pastor paused for a moment. "Some of them are," he said. We chatted some more, and I got the impression he was choosing his words carefully. Still, our conversation was casual. To listen to Pastor Eddington, you'd have thought we were discussing the weather or the Dallas Cowboys. But we were talking about miracles.
This wasn't at all what I'd expected. The pastor came across as humble, gentle, plainspoken. And he didn't seem the least bit surprised that a young white woman—a stranger who clearly didn't belong in this neighborhood—had suddenly materialized out of the darkness.
I was looking for a feature story to run in the Sunday paper. What I was about to discover was a passionate, self-taught man who would introduce me to a world of spirits, healing, prophecy, and warfare waged to the death between invisible forces of good and evil. To Pastor Eddington these things were not superstition, legend, or overwrought emotion. This was reality, and over the next few months I would see it for myself.
Months later, talking with Diane Eddington, the pastor's wife, I inquired about the little girl who had come skipping down the walk in front of the church, telling me that healings took place there. I asked the First Lady to point out the little girl so I could thank her, and Diane told me there was no such girl. I thought back to the night I had found this church. The sun had just set, it was a neighborhood where the crackle of gunfire was often heard, and a young girl was the only person on the sidewalk. I realized that no parent would dream of allowing her child to be out alone at night. Not only that, but no one who attended the service that evening had seen a girl matching the description I gave.
So who was the girl I talked to? Diane had an answer.
"Oh," she said, "you was just seeing an angel."
I have just finished reading all five volumes of Jaroslav Pelikan's The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine. My reaction could be summed up in Jerry Garcia's words: "What a long, strange trip it's been."
Focusing more on history than on doctrine (though in some senses the history of the Church is the history of doctrine), a great one-volume book on the first 1,000 years of the Church is The Early Church: The story of emergent Christianity from the apostolic age to the dividing of the ways between the Greek East and the Latin West (Revised Edition) by Henry Chadwick (The Penguin History of the Church 1). One should at least know what preceded the Reformation before moving on to or from Luther and Calvin and their descendants, and this is a great way to fill in one's knowledge gaps.I have about made up my mind that laws are like sausages — the less you know about how they are made, the more respect you have for them.Some of the variants include:
"The history of the Church us in many ways very disconcerting." - A History of Christian Doctrine, edited by Hubert Cunliffe-Jones with Benjamin Drewery (Introduction, p. 16)This is another book I'll probably recommend after I finish reading it.
I bought this book yesterday, based on a brief skimming (which impressed me), and as I have continued to read it, I am even more impressed; in fact, I also bought Part Two, which covers the Middle Ages prior to the Renaissance and the Reformation (Part Three - which I'll likely also buy). I recall having seeing these for sale at an Evangelical Theological Society meeting.
This book was born out of the author's deep conviction that today's Christians can benefit enormously from learning what God has done in the past. The mighty acts of Christ did not come to a halt soon after the events recorded in the book of Acts. In every century since the first, the Almighty has been at work and believers can trace his footsteps by studying the way that Christians of a previous generation faced the challenges that confronted them.
It is intended that this will be the first in a series of four volumes [Note: This Revised and Updated edition now says that there will be five volumes], which will cover the History of the Church from the earliest days up till modern times. Pastors and preachers will undoubtedly gain much from this series, and those who already have an interest in Church History will find the four (sic) books useful additions to their library. Nevertheless, the series is written in a style that will appeal to the non-specialist and any modern Christian will find it challenging and stimulating to be introduced to men and women who loved and served the same Savior that he loves and serves. This volume deals with the age of the Early Church Fathers and includes, together with many more, the stories of martyrs such as Blandina and Polycarp, theologians like Athanasius and Augustine of Hippo and preachers like John Chrysostom.
Nick Needham is a Londoner by birth and upbringing. He studied theology at New College, Edinburgh University, where he specialized in Church History. He also taught a course at New College on the life and works of the Swiss Reformer Ulrich Zwingli, at the same time completing his PhD thesis on the nineteenth-century Scottish theologian Thomas Erskine of Linlathen. He then taught Systematic Theology at the Scottish Baptist College in Glasgow for several years before spending a semester in Nigeria at the Samuel Bill Theological College, where he taught Church History. At present he is the assistant pastor of a church in north London. He is on the editorial board of the Foundations magazine and a trustee of the Evangelical Library. [Update: After a period as assistant pastor in a church in north London, he moved to the Highland Theological College, Dingwall, where he teaches Church History. He recently accepted a call to a pastorate in Inverness.]
