Photographs by
Eleanor Gaver
Mark's newest neighbors have built a campfire, and he sits with them in its warmth on this chilly night -- an almost straight-looking couple from near the Gulf. Among the others who come and go in the firelight, warming their hands a minute and saying good evening and perhaps not much else, are two extensively tattooed volunteers who man the tent for the Motorcycle Church of Christ. One of them shows how he's had to have some details changed in his decorations: "This used to be a demonic thing," he says of a beautiful, complicated scene on his forearm. "I had it changed into this cross. This one, I had to have her breasts covered up. Otherwise of course I wouldn't've had any tats done, after I got saved, because it says in the Bible not to mark your body."John, more or less the host of this gathering, still drinks beer in moderation, but Beauford, who has joined them in the firelight, hasn't touched a drop in over three years. "I was driving home from this guy's house one night and I saw this thing on the highway, just beside an overpass. Like a Christmas display. I kept going slower and slower, just looking at this thing -- a cross about 25 feet tall with two angels kneeling down on either side of it. I stopped the car and I got out and I started walking toward this thing -- it was Jesus on the cross. I couldn't believe how detailed it was, just perfectly lifelike, and when I got close enough I realized it wasn't a display. It was Jesus. It was two angels looking up at him. He was bloody and suffering and dying. And He raised his head ... and He just looked at me. With such pain. With such suffering on His face. And I knew it was for me, all that pain.
"I don't know how many times before that He was watching over me, and I never realized it, driving around no-hands with my head on backwards, thinking, 'Man, I'm not high enough.' I was moving 30 pounds of meth at a time. I'd say, 'Man, I feel like splitting,' and an hour after I'm gone the narcotics squad busts in. I got a feeling to leave this clubhouse one night and just a while afterward a rival club came down and four people got killed in the firefight. It got so people would point me out and say, I'm leaving when he leaves.
"So after I saw the cross, I got down on my knees and prayed to get right, especially to quit drinking, because I'd gotten a DUI. And I quit. After about six months, I was cleaning up my yard one time, picking up sticks and trash, and I bent over and there's this old empty beer can. I tossed it in the bag and I thought, I'm really proud I don't have to drink no more, proud of what I've done. And man, this voice comes behind me, a real voice, louder than I'm talking now, not a mental voice. I didn't turn around to see who it was. I knew who it was. And He said, 'Beauford, you didn't do this. I gave you what you asked of me.'"
Beauford is moved by his own account. He wipes his eyes and draws a ragged breath. But he doesn't appear agitated, or drunk with religion -- rather, genuinely gifted with inner peace. When he went in for evaluation after some months' probation on his DUI, he says, he told this story to the psychologist from beginning to end -- "' and that's it,' I told her. 'That's what happened. I don't care what you think.' " She stared at him for some time, her hand on a stack of forms and tests she'd intended to administer. "Then after a while she said, 'You know what? I gotta get some coffee.' A few minutes later she came back in and said, 'Look. Just go home,' and tossed all that stuff in the trash."
"Praise the Lord," Mark says. "What was the evaluation?"
"She recommended me to get the probation lifted."
"I would, too," Mark says.
One Word From God Can Change Your Life. FOREVER. But God has apparently been willing to grant much more than a single word to The Tribe of Judah and The Church of the Highway and El Shaddai's Warriors. Stories abound with messages, rescues, visions, unmistakeable voices -- and the bikes, the hurtling fever maniac drifter bikes, the bikes themselves, figure notably in the visionary moment and its beautiful story. "I went up to get healed one time," says Mike, an uncharacteristically frail, youthful biker, lifting up a malformed left thumb. "Right there. It don't bend right. The lady healing touched me on the neck and I turned around and was walking away and I didn't feel a thing. Then all of a sudden I felt this tingling rush from where she touched me, down through my big vein here right to my heart, and my heart was glowing inside. Well, that night I was riding home, and my headlamp went out. Poof. Just like that. So I tried this and I tried that -- nothing. Got back on the bike, sitting there with my head hanging, and all of a sudden it's just bright as day out ahead of me -- but the headlamp was still broken. I fired her up and rode along fine with this bright light ahead, no problem. And when I got to my home a voice spoke out just as clear as I'm speaking to you now. 'Mike, the reason I didn't heal your thumb is that I first had to heal your heart of its hardness. And the reason I gave you light was to let you know that no matter what, no matter what, I'll always show you the way in the darkness.'"
Saturday morning the Idaho man attends a "Healing School" run by Gloria Copeland from the same big stage. She starts right in with a prayer -- "Thank you for the Blood. There is healing in the Blood. Power in the Blood!" She asks the gathering to bow their heads, close their eyes, ask for whatever healing they want. Those who feel the need of a human touch form three lines and come forward -- some on crutches, some on wheels, some just limping -- to the waiting hands of various staff.
Kenneth Copeland steps onto the stage and leads a prayer of thanks: "Lord, we're enjoying each other, enjoying our bikes, enjoying the praise of God ..." As the white buckets for donations go wobbling along the rows from hand to hand a woman up front pitches over unconscious, and a bunch around her begin fanning her with their Bibles and hankies. "Whatever it is, God's more than enough. Help her there," Copeland says. "God is greater than whatever is disturbing her comfort."
Now come testimonies of healing. A man who'd wheeled himself forward is standing now, talking excitedly into a microphone below the lip of the stage. Another guy has had his sight restored, and pitches away his bulky mechanical glasses and says, "I can read those signs way over there!" He points at the signboards above the kiosks 150 yards away -- the man from Idaho can't make them out himself, in fact. "Steak Subs!" the blind man shouts. "Ready Spaghetti! Indian Fried Bread! Mudslide! Sanctified Swine Memphis BBQ! Texas Taters! Thirst No More Lemonade! Root Beer Floats! Chopped Beef Sandwiches!"
The Idaho man introduces himself to the nearest person in his row, a middle-aged black woman who turns out to be Nancy, from Chicago. "God is saying something," she says intensely as they shake hands, and won't let him go, staring into his eyes ... "He says you've been seeking, and just go ahead, you're doing fine. He says you got a cross in your back, but that's healed. And he says be sure and take a pen and a notepad with you, so you can write things down."
The man turns away, but something about what she's said strikes him now -- more than the coincidence of the pen and the pad and the seeking. "Excuse me," he says, returning to her. "Nancy, did you say something about my back?"
"You got a cross pinching your right back, down low. But it's gone now. He fixed it yesterday."
For four months the Idaho man has been undergoing weekly treatments for a pinched sciatic nerve in his lower right back. It hasn't occurred to him until this minute that it didn't bother him last night and hasn't bothered him all day. "I believe you're right," he tells Nancy.
"You didn't want to ask for healing," she says, "but He healed you anyway."
"Do these little incidents happen to you all the time?"
"Every day."
Saturday night Kenneth Copeland chats informally on stage with Mike Barber, former National Football League pro and currently a lay minister evangelizing in Texas prisons. "I expect God enjoys football," Copeland says. "Probably not near as much as we do, 'cause he's playing in a much bigger game."
Barber tries to tell about his work in prisons. He isn't at all slick, but rather nervous and stumbling over his tongue. "And he who has the Son has the Spirit. And he who doesn't have the Son doesn't have the Spirit ... doesn't say, 'I have the Spirit in my heart ...'"
The night's principal speaker is Mac Gober, Texan, Vietnam veteran, former Navy Seal, former bouncer, still a biker; a big-bellied, bald-headed, really piled-up looking man in jeans and gang colors. In his youth he ran with the Devil, ended up hiding in the mountains, wanted on attempted murder, his brothers bringing him supplies. Hit with the Light in a bathroom, in a bar. Though Hell is alluded to in these sermons, fierce images of it have given way to personal anecdotes of misdirection and misery: sin as its own punishment. Gober offers the weekend's only graphic of damnation: "I go scuba diving sometimes and when you get down past 60 feet the pressure is unbearable -- right in your ears, right into your head -- and when I read in here that if you lead one of these little ones astray it'll be for you just as if a stone were tied around your neck and you were cast into the depths of the sea -- I know it's gonna be bad."
The problem is sin. Any problem, every problem, all problems. "There ain't no crime problem in this country. There's a sin problem. If you empty your heart of sin and fill it up with Jesus, you ain't gonna hurt no -- body."
"Amen! Amen! Amen!"
"There ain't a racial problem around here -- there's a sin problem. If sin is removed and you're filled up with Jesus -- man, you'll love -- ever -- body!"
The audience goes crazy. The woman seated -- now standing -- in front of the Idaho man is speaking, he guesses, in tongues, uttering a stream of miscellaneous syllables while her husband, of whose presence she seems oblivious, embraces and comforts her. On either side of the stage the colossal image of the preacher's head stares soberly forward and a caption beneath it reads: Mac Gober.
Gober speaks not just to the convicts watching -- and Copeland has reported thousands saved by last night's broadcast -- but also to the wavering and tempted and troubled Christians among the audience in front of him -- "the backsludden" he calls them. "You gotta stay away from the places where temptation hangs around. Guys I'm working with say, 'Mac, I just can't keep away from the prostitutes.' 'Well,' I tell them, 'stay offa Fourth Avenue.'"
He asks everyone to bow their heads, "and you fellas, you fellas too" -- looking into the cameras, into the eyes of the criminals he can't see -- "don't mind about that guy next to you, never mind about what he thinks, this is you, your life, your soul. Now close your eyes and I'm gonna give you three categories to consider. Don't nobody look up. Just raise your hand if you're in this category: 'If I died tonight, I'd go to Heaven.' Now the next group, eyes closed, raise your hand: 'If I died tonight, I'm not sure where I'd go.' Now the ones who think, 'If I died tonight, I've done something so bad -- and I'm so far away -- I'm so lost -- I know I'd go to Hell." People are sobbing now, just a few here and there in the vast audience. "Now put your hand down and lift up your head. If you were in the last two categories, come forward now. Come down here close as you can get to the stage, right here." Fully a third of these thousands get up. The audience is a scarcely visible ocean on the western shore of which the vendors' stalls are lit and selling Mudslides and Snocones to the teenage sons and daughters of these penitents flowing forward to confess as a general group, repeating the words in unison after Mac Gober.
Sunday morning, before the afternoon baptisms which will be the Eagle Mountain Motorcycle Rally's ultimate event, a young woman from the Copeland Ministries staff stands on the stage giving out the prizes. There's one for the Oldest Biker: "Olin? Does this say Olin? I can't read this. Olin, the oldest biker at the rally." Olin doesn't come forward because, as somebody in the crowd who knows him reports, "He's resting." The Farthest Biker's Prize goes to two men who straddled their hogs here all the way up from Guatemala. The Longest Woman gets a prize too -- she came 1800 miles. A man whose colors read Jesus is Lord/Church of the Highway lands the prize for Best-Looking Bike.
Kenneth Copeland comes out to honor the person with the Best Testimony. Entrants have turned in written stories the afternoon before. The staff have read and judged among them and been most impressed with Meg's. "Meg didn't know how she'd get here. Didn't have hardly two dimes to rub against each other. But she knew God was gonna get her here. She quit her job in August, in Alaska, and just started out. Whenever she got a little money, she'd stop and send a tithe, a good part of whatever little she had. And she ended up here with a new set of clothes, and a thousand dollars in her pocket -- literally gave her way all the way down here!"
Copeland leads a prayer of thanks: According to the registration forms the attendees have been encouraged, but not required, to fill out, the population of this tent city is 10,700. "We thank you, Lord, for soul-winning Gospel preaching ... bikes ... boats, airplanes, whatever we can get our hands on, Lord, to witness to You.
"I know you might not know this about me, but my grandfather on my mother's side was a Cherokee Indian," Kenneth Copeland suddenly reveals. "So I think I can look on two sides of the experience of Native Americans, that's what I'm getting at. And I've had to reconcile those two sides, and we have got to reconcile those two sides -- now I know we have some Natives here today. Come up here. Come up here." He brings the Natives forward, about eight of them, and calls now for some whites -- "I mean lily white people, you know the kind I mean," and several men and woman turn up at his feet below the stage, whether shame-faced or not at the purity of their heritage it's hard to tell, because their backs are turned to the audience. Copeland puts the two groups face-to-face and the whites repeat after Copeland: Forgive my forefathers for "the pain, the theft, the breaking of covenants." Then the Natives ask forgiveness of the white forefathers for "raiding their camps and bringing strife." The strife, Copeland now declares, "has ended!" Now speaking as a Cherokee, he tells the Natives, "The Old Ways got us in trouble. It wasn't the White Man -- it was the witchcraft. But there's a New Way -- not the Red Man's Way, not the White Man's Way -- GOD'S WAY!"
The white buckets ride the rows. On the first day the Idaho man put 10 dollars in, 20 dollars on the second day. This time it's a 50.
These things accomplished, these truths preached, these prayers spoken, these testimonies heard, these prodigals welcomed, these tithes received, these prizes awarded, a thousand souls, more or less, hike in cutoff jeans, swimsuits, terrycloth robes down the runway, past Kenneth Copeland's small red jet airplane, and along a path for a mile to the east edge of Eagle Lake to be baptized. It's the weekend's most organized event: dozens of ushers, five lines of initiates divided by Dayglo orange traffic cones, repeated instructions of crowd control from a sound-truck -- belongings on the right, observers to the left -- amplified music, announcements about lost children.
Mark and Beauford and their Idaho companion won't be getting wet today. Although Mac Gober, among other speakers, has assured everybody a little repetition can't damn you, they've each been baptized once already, and they sit about 50 meters from the action, beside a woman whose T-shirt says "if you can't take the heat stay outa Hell" and two young cowboys both smoking away on cheroots, on a knoll where observers are repeatedly encouraged to take themselves. Many of those watching, almost all of them, hundreds of people, have crowded around the shore, both to get a closer view and to avoid the fireants and pointy Texas devil-burrs in the vegetation. Just offshore 14 men, most of them in gang colors, stand up to their waists in the steel-blue water beckoning, beckoning, as the lines of people break off on the watery ends and each person slogs forward into the embrace of two or three or four of the Tribe of Judah or the Swords of Christ and goes down backwards and comes up joyful, redeemed, entirely new. On the lake's far side, which is not owned by Copeland Ministries, some people are fishing from a small motorboat.
No estimate of this year's numbers has been offered, but last year 900 people received the sacrament of Baptism on the rally's final day. By midafternoon the men in the water must be chilled and exhausted, but they're having the time of their lives, and even Mac Gober stands in Eagle Lake with his arms open wide. "Now, just go to the first available person, please," the PA insists. "God is no respecter of persons, so don't hold things up by waiting to get baptized by one particular person or another particular person ..." and when the last has washed forward, fallen backward in their arms and been immersed and come up clean and labored back ashore with glittering eyes, the bikies get into a water-fight. Another Lost Child announcement -- little boy about four years old in a T-shirt that says "Dad's Best Fishing Buddy" on it. "Wait a minute!" the big voice cries out over the lake. "He's been found! He's been found! Praise the Lord!"
March 22, 1996
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