I began to say no but put the brakes on my tongue. “That’s exactly what I was looking for. Thanks,” I told her. The guide was a pleasant-looking sixtyish lady with perfectly coiffed white hair, and wearing a tailored, buff blue sixtyish-lady’s suit, and standing around her in a neat, respectful arc were eight tour-takers, six of them women. They all looked to be in the same age bracket as their guide.
“I thought you appeared to be a little bit lost,” Ms. Guide said with an indulgent smile. “I’m Nella Reid, and I was just beginning to tell the rest of our guests here about how the Tabernacle of the Silver Spire came into being.”
“Don’t let me interrupt. Tell away.”
“Oh, it’s all right, I just this minute started. As I was saying to the others, our founder and leader, Barnabas Bay, began a ministry some eighteen years ago in a small town down along the New Jersey coast. He was young then — he’s still young, in my view,” she chuckled, “forty-nine on his next birthday. Anyway, Barney — that’s what he likes us all to call him — had been an assistant pastor in two churches in Georgia, where he hails from, when he felt a call to come north. So he packed up with his pretty wife and went to this resort area just north of Cape May. For about four years, he preached to vacationers who would gather on the beach in the warm months; and he preached to the locals — there were a lot fewer of them, of course — in the cold months, using an old church building that had been vacant for ages.
“Well, the Lord works in wondrous ways. Time magazine heard about Barney, and they did a big feature on this ‘barefoot preacher of the beach,’ as they called him. After that article ran, money came in from all over, and Barney was able to build a beautiful new church building in that little town, a building that is still used today.”
Nella Reid’s eyes danced as she looked from face to face. “Now, if I were to ask each one of you to name the most godless city in America, what would you answer?”
A tall, big-boned guy with a deeply lined face and white hair falling over one eye who I later learned was named McPherson piped up: “That’s easy — we’re in it right now, the good ol’ Big Apple.”
“We’re from Sioux Falls,” his wife added solemnly, as if that lent weight to her spouse’s opinion.
“Anybody else want to comment?” our smiling guide asked.
“I’d have to vote for New York as well,” a moonfaced woman of a certain age laughed, “even if I did come all the way from Kentucky to see the town.”
“I’ll add my vote too,” put in another woman, this one thin, with oversize dark-rimmed glasses and sporting a Prince Valiant haircut, “and I’ve been to Las Vegas — twice.”
“Barney wouldn’t be surprised to hear how you’ve all responded,” Nella Reid told them in exactly the tone that Mrs. Cunningham, my third-grade teacher, used when congratulating one of us on spouting a right answer. “He felt, and feels, the same way you do. When he was down there in New Jersey, he knew the Lord was calling him to come to New York City, where there was — still is — so much work to do.”
She paused, but she was nowhere near good enough an actress to make it seem spontaneous. “Now, I must add that New York is filled with absolutely wonderful, wonderful people, many of whom are stalwarts in our congregation. But there are so many more thousands who desperately need to be reached. Barney knew that when he came here fourteen years ago, and he knows it more than ever today, despite the magnificent progress he’s made here at Silver Spire.
“See that?” she asked, gesturing dramatically to a small brick-and-frame church with a steeple about a fourth the height of the big spire in a thick grove of trees across the parking lot. “That is our Cana Chapel, and it was Barney’s first building after he came here. He named it for Christ’s first miracle, where He turned the water into wine at the wedding in Cana, because he felt his establishing a church on Staten Island — right in the city of New York — was indeed a miracle. We’ll visit the chapel later, but now it’s time to see the tabernacle itself. Follow me, please.”
We obediently trailed her, with the McPhersons squabbling about what year they’d made their first and only other expedition to the wilds of New York. I think the wife won, but I made a point to drift to the opposite side of the group as we entered the building through a different door than I’d used earlier. Nella Reid led us into a two-story lobby and held up a hand to still any conversation.
“We are in the narthex of the sanctuary now,” she said with reverence. “I know it looks terribly expensive, what with all this beautiful white marble on the walls and granite on the floor, but you should know that every bit of that stone — and most of the construction cost of the tabernacle and its office-and-school wing — was donated by a gentleman in the congregation who is a builder and who came to know God through Barney. Now let’s go into the sanctuary.”
It was an impressive auditorium, I’ll give it that, with a big balcony and a wall of glass at least twenty feet high and twice that wide behind the pulpit that looked out on a grove of willows and a picture-postcard lagoon where a pair of white swans floated lazily. A large glass or clear plastic cross hung above the pulpit, apparently suspended on wires, although I couldn’t see them. Nella told us, at least three times, that the place seated something over thirty-six hundred — all upholstered theater-type seats, not pews — and that it was jammed to the rafters for the three services Sunday mornings, plus one service each Sunday night. She pointed out the locations of the four TV cameras and the control booth at the back of the balcony where the sound and lights are monitored.
“Our middle service each Sunday is telecast on a cable hookup to more than two hundred stations across the United States and goes by satellite to several foreign countries. Barney preaches every Sunday that he’s not traveling. And sometimes he illustrates his sermons with films or tapes,” she told us proudly. “There’s a control panel built into the pulpit that allows him to dim the lights, draw dark curtains electronically across the big window, lower the large screen that’s recessed into the ceiling, and activate the projector upstairs. When we have a well-known singer or musician here to perform at a Sunday service, their image also gets projected by video on the screen so that worshipers farther back in the sanctuary get a better view.”
“Real space-age stuff.” Mr. McPherson of Sioux Falls nodded his approval.
“I guess you could call it that,” our guide said. “We aren’t trying to be fancy here, but Barney feels many churches today don’t involve their congregations enough. He’s always coming up with new ways to get his points across. For instance, you’ll notice that the pulpit is actually up on a theater-type stage. Barney had the tabernacle designed with a stage rather than the traditional altar, because he likes the flexibility of sometimes having a playlet or a drama as part of the Sunday service. And the pulpit itself can be lowered hydraulically into the floor of the stage so that it’s totally out of sight when not being used.”
“Not what I usually think of as a church,” said the moon-faced lady from Kentucky, shaking her head, “but I guess it must work.”
“We like to think so,” Nella replied, trying unsuccessfully to sound modest. “But we also know there are many paths to the Lord.”
“Amen.” That came from the Prince Valiant lady, the one who had been to Las Vegas twice. “Does Barnabas Bay work here during the week?”
Our hostess nodded vigorously. “Oh, yes, every day. We have a whole wing devoted to offices and to Christian Education — classrooms for both children’s and adult Sunday school, as well as for classes that are held on weekday evenings. And we have a day-care center, too, for more than three hundred children.”