Grace and Beloved's ChurchSearch Week 3: Grace takes Beloved back to her teenage church

Whereas most churches have a cross or crucifix or altar at the front, Big Charismatic Baptist Church has a giant world map. Whereas Place of Former Employment sees its mission as to a small inner-city neighbourhood, BCBC sees it as to the world. Whereas PoFE employs a few people for its community work, BCBC sends and supports dozens of missionaries across the globe. BCBC is, then, the sort of place that's really exciting to be part of as a teenager: you feel the world as at your fingertips and that you can make a difference.

BCBC is, however, a Church with a Past. In the seventies, one of its leading lights landed them into all sorts of theological controversies over Baptism in the Holy Spirit (which it liked) and The Place of Woman (which it didn't). So whereas they're obviously the type of church with a predisposition to declaim to individuals that their life choices will land them in hell (they tried this when they found out I was doing a degree involving the study of Islam), they don't like to be portrayed as the Lunatic Fringe they probably are.

The first time Beloved and BCBC leadership found themselves in the same room, there was Controversy. Suffice to say, it ended in the wife of said leader being banned from attending our wedding. Oh pleeeeeease...

It was thus with some trepidation we went back yesterday. Instead of running into any of the leadership, though, we met Catrina. Catrina and I were in the youth group together and it's Catrina who had the Dramatic Healing. It didn't even seem remarkable at the time. When she turned up to the group that night to tell us that her ever-worsening chronic backache had been diagnosed as a serious skeletal deformity that could render her immobile within months without surgery, we just did what 16 year old Charismatics did it such situations, and laid Catrina down on the floor to pray for her. And we prayed for her. And we saw her spine straighten and her pelvis realign. It didn't surprise us that God did this. It didn't surprise us that Catrina had no further pain, nor that she was suddenly three inches taller than before we'd prayed... and nor that, the following week, Catrina was deemed by doctors no longer in need of surgical intervention. God did it, we knew.

I wish that I still expected so much from God and from churches. I wish that I still had that sort of faith. Still, though, even now I experience God so much more easily in BCBC than in any other church I've ever visited or been part of. With Beloved in tow, I know that I would never be welcomed or accepted as a BCBC member (and, of course, being a woman is still a bit iffy... oh pleeeeease) but for once in a while, for a quick injection of nostalgia, hope and faith, yes, it's OK...