Word: bethell
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Address: P.O. Box 450, Bethel...
Directions: 3 hours from Boston, 95 north to exit 11 Maine trnpk, Route 26 to Bethel...
...nerve center of black Neo-Pentecostalism is Bethel A.M.E. Church in Baltimore, which presents an invigorating blend of rollicking music and old- time religion. The church had 500 members in 1974; today it boasts more than 7,000. The average age of members is 35, and nearly half are men. Bethel is proudly Afrocentric -- a bright mural of African faces is painted over the altar -- and has traded its pipe organ for a jazz band. Pastor Frank Reid, 39, holds degrees from Yale and Harvard Divinity School...
Reid's sermons are interspersed with traditional Pentecostal dancing and singing, while at one point in the Sunday service worshipers break up into cozy prayer circles. Bethel is an energetically activist congregation: last year it clothed and fed 18,000 people, and it operates programs for older people, teens, women, youths with school problems and adults who cannot read. Next on the agenda is a $10 million athletic center...
Congregation member Larry Little is convinced that churches like Bethel represent not only the best spiritual hope for American blacks, but perhaps their best social hope as well. "In the next 10 years," he predicts, "you'll see the churches growing through the walls because people have nowhere else to go." Whatever its religious forms, in other words, the black church still has what Lincoln and Mamiya call the "institutionalized staying power of a human community that has been under siege for close to 400 years." If the church flourishes, the community will gain strength...