Evangelical Tongues (At 10:50)

In the course of a million miles of air travel I have bunked overnight in some exasperatingly noisy hostelries. Until last summer I considered one of the worst experiences to be the one I had in St. Louis shortly after the new Marriott airport motel opened there. What one presumably pays for is a good night’s sleep. So my midnight complaint to the front desk about the miniature rock festival that had erupted in the room above mine seemed fair enough. Unfortunately, the house detective must have identified the source of the complaint, for soon hastily retreating aggressors were pounding on my door every half hour.

At 2:30 A.M. I finally notified the desk clerk that I would spend the night in the lobby and that, while I would cover meal and service charges, I absolutely refused to pay a cent for my room. Indeed, I added, should the manager wish to notify the sheriff and the local press, I would be more than glad to meet with them. Once ensconced in the lobby, I posted word to a newsmagazine that I was minded to lead a consumer crusade requiring hotels and motels to cancel room charges when guests are deprived of sleep because of poor hostelry management and controls. The Marriott management, I should add, later apologized (and canceled room charges), and despite my private vow never to frequent that place again I did return and had a far happier experience.

There is, it seems to me, another situation when intrusive clatter is even worse and less appropriate than at midnight in a hotel. That is in the church sanctuary during the ten minutes or so preceding the so-called worship service. Some devout people—although they seem to be a vanishing tribe—come a bit early not simply to be on time but also to ready their hearts spiritually to meet with God in his sanctuary. Yet a blustering evangelical glossalalia, a veritable tornado of chatter, frequently thrusts itself upon all comers, pushing the organist into an ever louder prelude. The chatter—about Sally’s wedding, or Junior’s car, or Phil’s vegetable patch—often continues well into the service, hardly to the edification of seeking sinners or to the good of the local church, let alone the church universal.

Not all evangelical congregations, thank God, display this spiritual insensitivity and irreverence. But it is nonetheless characteristic of even some of the most prestigious churches. Recently a visiting college professor was so disconcerted by the chatter in a church that prominently placards itself as “an N.A.E. Church” that he subsequently wrote the pastor to inquire whether this pre-service prattle was a newly developed N.A.E. ritual. The letter was, of course, both rash and unfair to many non-N.A.E. churches that specialize no less in congregational gabbling. Some staunch Southern Baptist churches, for example, have lost prospective members because what happens in the moments before a church service somehow suggests how members conceive of worship.

The past summer added a new dimension to both my hotel and my church experiences. That was in Dae Jong, South Korea, a city completely leveled by North Korean Communists in the 1940s and now rebuilt into a thriving community. Stored in nearby mountains for future emergency, so it is rumored, is the largest stockpile of atomic missiles to be found anywhere in the world outside the United States. I could glimpse those hills as I drove to speak to Dae Hueng Baptist Church about a spiritual peace and power the world does not know.

Ten minutes before the morning service I was startled by an outburst of singing in the auditorium. The singing starts, I was told, as soon as a cluster of believers has assembled; one person simply leads out in some familiar hymn or announces a page number in the hymnal. The spirit of devotion carries over into the scheduled service, and a distinctive witness about transcendent power and peace is borne to visitors and to the community. During the past five years South Korean Baptists have increased by 50 per cent and their churches by 38 per cent. When I asked about the worship atmosphere of the churches, a missionary replied: “Korean churches are more reverent than American evangelical churches.”

He might have added that American churches sometimes remind the experienced traveler of an Asian hotel. In many Oriental cultures, one expects noise as a kind of norm. Silence is often considered a mark of rejection, while participation in group demonstration signals acceptance. Radios blare incessantly. To be heard one must raise his voice above the varied background chatter.

In my Dae Jong hotel, therefore, I quite expected the intense adjoining-room conversations, the big-sounding discussions in the hallway, the loud knocking on doors by friends calling on each other, and perhaps even the canned music (imported from the West) blaring through the halls. I had the further misfortune of being lodged in “the only available room” directly below a nightclub where curfew hours from midnight until four in the morning were enjoyed to the full by combo-whetted merrymakers. Crowning that, two hotel employees conversed so vociferously at the porter’s desk that their voices bounced through the long hallway and into Room 713. In my red-striped pajamas I finally padded down the hall to the porter’s desk to ask them to contain their boisterousness. They willingly accompanied me back to my room and—believe it or not—tried to help track down the offending noise-makers; I just couldn’t get across to them the fact that it was they themselves who were the transgressors. I suppose that when one thinks that what he or she does is the norm, then the offending culprits are always somewhere around the next corner. There’s a hidden lesson here, no doubt.

Could those ten minutes before morning worship be the secret passage to evangelical awakening? Those who ignore the divine injunction “Be still and know that I am God” (Ps. 46:10) are readily deceived into a preoccupation with assorted false gods. The true and living God is deprived of the full opportunity to speak to us when we turn church-going into a secular social dialogue. It could be that loquacious communicants assume that the silent meditators in the pews are merely in need of a good night’s sleep. But the garrulous, if they come to church to be on speaking terms with high heaven, need to talk to God rather than to Cousin Bill and Neighbor Jill. The threshold of morning worship is prime time to listen to the transcendent Voice and to meditate on his written Word.

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