Dallas News Blog

Pope Benedict XVI, like you didn't know that

Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to the United States has provoked an examination of the relationship between Roman Catholics and evangelical Christians, who share a similar social agenda. Southern Baptist scholar, author and commentator Al Mohler points respectfully to the continuing, seemingly insoluble doctrinal differences between the two faith traditions, and Christianity Today emphasizes the common ground, in two representative stories.

Pentecostals such as myself are part of the evangelical fold, of course, but many of us have had more extensive interaction with Catholic believers than the typical evangelical because of the Charismatic movement’s origins in Catholic as well as Protestant churches. Granted, you’ll find Pentecostal churches that are virulently anti-Catholic, but I believe they’re becoming more rare as Pentecostals are exposed to the breadth of their faith through television and major conferences.

Green Mountain Grrrlz

Three weeks after I got married, I found myself in a desperate place. On my knees in prayer, begging God to make me love my husband. I figured I’d just made the biggest mistake of my life. Maybe there was still a chance to pull through.

Don’t get me wrong: There was nothing wrong with my husband. He was kind, attentive, a good listener, a considerate lover. Really, I had no idea why he loved me so much, and that was part of the problem. My disbelief, rooted somehow in deep feelings of rejection, caused me to test that love in obnoxious ways.

This is an intensely personal column, so if that’s not your thing, consider this fair warning. One subject that continually comes up every time I post Bible Girl are comments concerning same-sex attraction, along with epithets directed my way such as “lezbo.” That's probably because not long after I launched Bible Girl, I wrote a column about my struggle with same-sex attraction as a teenager and young adult, and for better or worse this column has been identified with that subject ever since.

I left many things unsaid in that early column. To be honest, I was kinda chicken. I had just enough fortitude to say what I did -- that Jesus Christ had “delivered” me from a struggle with same-sex attraction -- but no more. Since the subject and the accusations won’t go away, I’m gonna tell it: Just how this transformation occurred.

JohnMcCain.com

Two news articles in recent days have shed light on an enigma: John McCain’s Christian faith. Andrea Billups’ story in the Washington Times -- despite its inadvertently funny lede, which appears to have caught multiple people sleeping at the copy desk -- will do nothing to boost evangelical Christians’ comfort level with McCain. For evangelicals, all the candidate has going for him is that he’s anti-abortion in a race where the other candidates aren’t. Another story posted on the Associated Baptist Press Web site offers the most detail to date about McCain’s relationship with his church, North Phoenix Baptist, and pastor, the Reverend Dan Yeary. And this too will stoke suspicion about McCain’s faith, not confidence.

Wonder why evangelicals haven’t cottoned to McCain? Here are four reasons why -- and they’re less about his tepid opposition to gay marriage than a deeper concern that his Christian faith isn’t the guiding force of his life. If it isn’t the guiding force, the thinking goes, it’s an add-on, a malleable, negotiable thing, and it can’t be trusted.

Bishop T.D. Jakes

On his recently launched blog, Bishop T.D. Jakes of Dallas has responded sharply to a story by CNN correspondent John Blake that dismisses Jakes as a “prosperity pastor” who has shunned the message of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.

“Prosperity pastors such as Bishop T.D. Jakes have become the most popular preachers in the black church,” Blake writes. “They’ve also become brands. They’ve built megachurches and business empires with the prosperity message.”

Blake contrasts black preachers such as Jakes, Creflo Dollar and Dr. Frederick K. Price with “prophetic” ministers such as the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, who “often enrage people because they proclaim God’s judgment on nations.” The money preachers fill the pews, Blake writes, but prophetic pastors don’t because of their challenging message. These ministers, he says, are the ones who embody the message of King.

Bible Girl was all ready to wax indignant about the prospect of children being ripped from their mothers, and then I read about the bed. Which is to say: the bed in the temple in Eldorado, where dirty old men got their freak on with underage virgins.

Yep, right about then all my sympathy went out the window, and I realized that the sick culture of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints needs to be busted up, deprogrammed, prosecuted, whatever.

I don’t think polygamy is the ultimate sin, as repugnant to modern sensibilities as it is. It has existed in many cultures through the millennia, including among the ancient Jews. But it’s clear to me that this sect’s practice of polygamy is motivated by plain old freakiness. Teenage virgin brides don’t complain, don’t make demands and can’t relate to their much older husbands as peers. They’re just sperm receptacles.

Wow. You mean it takes all that?

OK, so maybe I’m naïve, but that was my thought when I read Dennis Rodman’s account of sex with Madonna, which you’ll find in his 1997 autobiography, Bad as I Wanna Be. No, I don’t remember the details -- if you really want ‘em, Rodman’s book can be obtained for the princely sum of a penny on Amazon -- I just recall that the whole scenario was complicated and laborious and about as sexy as assembling particleboard furniture in the dark.

Seems as if the Like-a-Virgin lady needed a whole lot of preliminaries just to get started, and I thought, man, she must really be jaded about sex. Well, on second thought, it was Dennis Rodman.

Never mind why I was paging through that book looking for the sex scene in the first place. My little epiphany -- that a lot of folks in our licentious society are really, really bored with sex -- stuck with me over the years, and I started taking mental notes and compiling lists of cultural signposts, stuff I kept hearing about in the media and in conversations with friends:

Bishop T.D. Jakes

Dallas’ Bishop T.D. Jakes has launched his own blog, and he steps right into the fray with a lengthy post about the Reverend Jeremiah Wright controversy. True to form, Jakes avoids political hard lines and instead gives insights designed to provoke the consciences of blacks as well as whites. He does think the Wright controversy is an attempt by the media to discredit Barack Obama, and he offers high praise for the candidate’s speech on race and its result -- that it got everyone talking about this difficult, perilous subject.

Jakes notes that Wright’s “infamous sermon” -- not sure exactly which one he’s referring to -- “sounded angry.” He notes that many blacks “feel left without true vindication,” but “we are not monolithic, and all blacks do not all agree with him…” The bishop observes what I have seen in my mostly black church circle: Every preacher and spiritual leader I know is wrestling with how to respond in 2008 to the lingering effects of this country’s racist past and the anger and resentment that still exist.

Thanks to a few incendiary soundbites, recordings of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s sermons are circulating among church people, making their way from hand to hand and e-mail to iPod. A politically active young man in my church gave my husband a copy of the full message from which the infamous phrase “America’s chickens are coming home to roost” had been ripped, and from there the CD found its way to me.

I listened to the September 16, 2001, sermon a few times and chewed on the preacher’s words in context. The furor over Wright’s statements has spread far and wide; you usually won’t find Pentecostals spending much time delving into the messages of a theologically liberal United Church of Christ pastor, but we were curious to see if this man deserves all of the harsh criticism that’s been directed his way. My conclusion: He doesn’t. Many black Christians -- and surely some white ones too -- see the controversy over Wright as a desperate attempt to derail and discredit Barack Obama’s candidacy. I heard this from Democrats and Republicans alike.

Rev. Jeremiah Wright will be honored by Texas Christian University's Brite Divinity School on March 28.

These were his spiritual sons, men he’d ordained into ministry and sent into a hateful world. And now they’d turned their backs on him.

Bishop Charles Harrison Mason, a Southern holy man, the son of freed slaves, had shared the platform with white and black preachers in the darkest years of Jim Crow. Mason knew that the gospel he preached allowed no provision for hatred or prejudice; these were sins that damned a soul to hell.

He suffered for this gospel. Mason was beaten and thrown in jail; the FBI maintained a file on him because of his interracial practices and pacifism. History provides only the scantiest details about Mason, the black Pentecostal apostle who founded the Church of God in Christ. His followers were drawn from the lowest strata of society, laborers, domestics and dirt farmers who desperately needed a miracle-working Jesus for everything from food to freedom. Theirs was largely an oral tradition.

We do know that many of the white ministers Mason had ordained pulled away from their black brothers to form the Assemblies of God.

One remarkable fact is noted in the history books. At the Assembly of God’s first convention in Hot Springs in 1914, Mason was invited to preach. He did that and more -- offering his blessing on the new, all-white organization, which would later become the largest Pentecostal denomination in the world. The division of black from white is starkly evident today: The Church of God in Christ is overwhelmingly black, and the Assemblies of God are predominantly white.

I think of Mason when I consider the words and deeds of a much more ordinary man of God: Barack Obama’s former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Trinity United Church of Christ

Barack Obama with the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., in a now-famous photo taken three years ago

There were the “Cocktail Christians”: the Lutherans in my Wisconsin hometown who did their sacred rites on Sunday morning and tipped multiple martinis Sunday night. Punch in; punch out. That was their version of the Christian faith, performed to the tune of dirgelike hymns and clinking cocktail glasses.

Another one of my mother’s pet phrases was “All this and Jesus too.” These were the folks who celebrated their own wonderfulness -- their wealth, their health, their beauty -- and tacked on a few props for Jesus when things were really sweet.

My mom was altogether different, a righteous Democrat wrapped around a core of abstemious fundamentalist. She told me how, at 18, she’d watched Martin Luther King Jr. on television and concluded, right there in her all-white neighborhood on the South Side of Milwaukee, that he was right and everyone else was wrong. She shook a pale finger in her parents’ faces and pronounced them racists.

She hauled me to Vietnam War protests when I was a kid and taped an anti-war poster to my bedroom door. Later on, she’d work the phone at a crisis pregnancy hotline. All of this left a deep impression on me.

“Why are you doing these stories?”

She looked me in the eye and spoke slowly. Her lunch sat untouched in front of her.

“Why do you care?”

I struggled to find words. It’s my job to ask questions, but this woman wanted answers. For years, she said, many people had known about Pastor Sherman Allen’s practice of beating women with a paddle as a twisted form of spiritual discipline. (For a full report, see the February 21 Dallas Observer cover story, “The Reverend Spanky.”) Allen was so smart, so “spiritual,” so friendly when that’s the side of his character he wanted people to see, that dozens of women got entangled with him. She was one of them.

When she told her story to her Christian friends and leaders of her former denomination, the Church of God in Christ, she says she was treated like she was crazy.

She knows it’s hard for outsiders to understand, as many of the comments to my Bible Girl columns on Allen demonstrate. “He may be a sicko, but what kind of adult idiot allows someone to paddle them?” goes a typical comment.

Brian Harkin

Barack Obama at Reunion Arena, February 20

It’s a beautiful thing, this vision of black and white together.

A couple of burly white guys let my black friends cut in line. Children of different hues swapped electronic gadgets and hung on their mommies, and the conversation ranged free and easy among Barack Obama supporters of all colors and persuasions -- white, black, Latino, gay -- as we waited for three hours to be seated in Reunion Arena for last week’s rally.

The line of 15,000 or so snaked this way and that, winding through concrete arches where I watched a rainbow swarm of cheaters try to cut in front of us amidst the confusion. A lot of them managed to ooze in front, but I didn’t hear a single cuss word fly. (OK, I admit my pastor’s wife had to shame me into keeping my place in line.)

I did hear a lot of the usual conspiracy-theory claptrap, which never ceases to annoy me -- about Katrina, the wicked oil companies, fear-mongering as an election tactic. But this was a happy, upbeat crowd. I couldn’t have picked a fight if I tried.

Pastor Sherman Allen portrayed his marriage to first wife Edwina Cunningham as a sort of fairytale, with his wife in the role of a needy Cinderella and he as the prince who rescued her from material and emotional poverty. When Edwina died in 2003 of complications from scleroderma, a skin disease, Allen even penned a book titled For Better or For Worst describing what the couple went through while she was in declining health. But former members of Fort Worth’s Shiloh Institutional Church of God in Christ and family friends describe a different kind of relationship behind the scenes.

One family friend had some good things to say about Allen, the subject of last week's cover story in the paper version of Unfair Park -- and, of course, a fixture on Unfair Park. He spoke admiringly of Allen’s down-to-earth manner -- how the preacher would meet him at the door in a V-neck undershirt and boxer shorts, and how a person’s race made no difference to him. The source admired Allen’s Tuesday-night Bible studies, where the pastor dug into the Scriptures in depth. “It was biblically and doctrinally sound,” the source says. “He broke it down verse by verse, word by word.” He much preferred those sessions to Sunday mornings, where the preaching and teaching always revolved around “money, money, money.”

Sherman Allen sure is ... um ... interesting.

The rumors floated around for years in the local Pentecostal church scene (and, on Unfair Park, for that matter). But Your Bible Girl's got the inside story: Pastor Sherman Allen’s strange affinities for crystal balls, voodoo and butt-whuppings. In this week’s cover story in the paper version of Unfair Park, we examine Allen's past in the voodoo-influenced Spiritualist church, his rise to prominence in the Church of God in Christ and the 20 years of allegations that the embattled pastor of Shiloh Institutional Church in Fort Worth paddled and sexually abused young women.

Though many men and women of conscience complained about Allen’s behavior over the years, their attempts to stop Allen came screeching to a halt at Bishop J. Neaul Haynes of Dallas, Allen’s overseer in the Church of God in Christ who know everything and did nothing. Bible Girl also reports on the most recent lawsuit filed against Allen, as well as some really freaky stuff that makes her blush. Oh, and been missing Bible Girl? Look for the brand-new Bible Girl blog, coming soon to the Observer's home page. --Julie Lyons

Is Church of God in Christ Presiding Bishop Charles E. Blake soft on homosexuality and too cozy with loose-living celebrities? Is he taking his denomination -- the biggest Pentecostal body in the United States -- far away from its roots as a “holiness” church?

Or is he ushering in much-needed modernizations and establishing a greater national profile for a storied organization that essentially birthed the black gospel scene, set the standard for black preaching and made exuberant worship -- including dancing -- the norm in Pentecostal and charismatic churches today?

These questions are on the minds of many of the leaders and delegates who will gather in Memphis this week for the Church of God in Christ’s week-long Holy Convocation -- which, this year, also serves to celebrate the denomination’s 100th anniversary.

A group of COGIC leaders, including a former presiding bishop, Chandler D. Owens of Marietta, Georgia, is vying to unseat Blake at the convocation, and while some of these leaders cite a constitutional crisis as the main reason for their opposition to Blake, behind the scenes the debate revolves around homosexuality and COGIC’s identity and heritage as a church with strict standards for morality.

At the risk of sounding sappy -- and oh, Bible Girl hates sounding sappy; must be a consequence of my crime reporter days -- let me tell you something that is going to sound kinda sappy. When I prayed for a friend’s physical healing a few weeks ago and saw significant improvement, my heart got all soft and squishy with compassion. Plus, my faith got a big boost.

All of a sudden I saw the realities, the possibilities: that God really does care for us down to the minute details of our lives, and that our first resort always should be prayer. And yes, that Jesus Christ still heals.

The same thoughts occurred to my friend "DD," who I wrote about last week. DD, a physician who is well-regarded in her field, got relief from a sickle cell disease pain crisis through prayer. Then the whole world opened up to her. Her compassion for people in pain -- the pain from a sickle cell attack is "beyond excruciating," DD says, so she knows what she's talking about -- will no longer allow her to turn her back on suffering.

That's why we found ourselves driving to Houston a few Saturdays ago to pray for an otherwise young and healthy friend of DD's who'd been experiencing disabling headaches for a month. Several other staff members of her ministry organization, which supports the underground churches in a certain Middle Eastern country, were experiencing similar symptoms. (I can't name the country because of the very real dangers of working in Christian ministry there.)

What a racket. Two years ago, my son tossed a ping pong ball in a glass bowl at his school carnival, and he was awarded -- ha ha, awarded -- a tiny goldfish in a plastic bag. A brown goldfish, no less.

Evidently a certain pet store was cleaning out its inventory of crummy brown goldfish and hit on the perfect win-win solution -- for them. My son was thrilled with his prize, and, like several other suckers at his school, Mom and Dad walked out of the store with a $60 aquarium starter kit.

Well, it wasn't two weeks before our brown goldfish -- dubbed Swifty -- developed a nasty case of fin rot. The creeping crud swiftly corroded Swifty's fins and tail. Eventually all he had were jagged nubs for fins and a single slender bone in place of a tail. Then even the bone fell off. He looked like a goner for sure.

We pumped this antibiotic stuff into the tank, all in an effort to spare our son's tender heart. Finally, with Swifty scudding around feebly at the bottom of the tank, I suggested to my son that we pray for him. I'd always believed in prayer for physical healing, but more in a theoretical sense. I'd be the first to admit my faith was weak. Though the gospels are filled with accounts of miraculous healings -- and no indication that God can't do the same stuff today -- I hadn't seen a whole lot of it personally. I'm sure my attitude had something to do with being a doctor's kid, and constantly hearing people's ignorant jabbering about their various ailments, and the fact that, far as I knew, I'd never been miraculously healed of anything physical.

Well, laugh all you want, but the boy and I got down on our knees one evening, placed our hands on the tank and prayed for Swifty's healing. We prayed passionately. I kind of rode on the kid's faith. Not too far in the back of my mind was this thought: If I can't believe God to heal a goldfish, my faith really is pathetic.

Have you prayed for Osama today?

If you want to know what defines an evangelical Christian, look no further than Brother Andrew, the 79-year-old Dutchman who called himself "God's smuggler." He is a revered figure among evangelicals because of his single-minded devotion to spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ -- one of the defining points of evangelicalism. Brother Andrew wrote famously in his 1967 best-seller God's Smuggler about transporting Bibles behind the Iron Curtain, sometimes in plain view of customs agents and frequently at risk of his life. You made the blind eyes see, Brother Andrew prayed on one of his smuggling forays; now make seeing eyes blind.

Yet Brother Andrew's latest mission -- supporting the persecuted churches in the Middle East -- will undoubtedly run him straight up against another definition of evangelical: the one that presumes an alliance with conservative American politics. Brother Andrew, who was in Dallas recently to talk about his new book, Secret Believers: What Happens When Muslims Believe in Christ, co-written with Al Janssen, believes that the war in Iraq has been a terrible tragedy for Iraqi Christians -- and, he says, a devastating blow to the church worldwide.

What's a nice Jewish girl like Dawn Eden doing in a place like this?

Dawn Eden manages to make chastity funny. Not ha-ha funny, but way funnier than I thought. Now that's quite an accomplishment, don't you think? I know it never got a belly laugh out of me before.

Eden, the 39-year-old author of The Thrill of the Chaste, stopped in Dallas last Saturday on her speaking tour and talked chastity with a room full of Catholic women of all ages. Eden warned us upfront that she has a stammer, and "when I talk about sex my stammer goes into overdrive."

Never happened, though. Instead, Eden came across as a woman who's fully embraced living chastely. She's funny, charming and persuasive. Well, good for her, I say to myself. I hope it all ends soon -- really. In the nicest possible way.

After reading her book and hearing her speak, I took with me a new understanding of the meaning of intimacy, with or without sex, married or no. Read it, OK? What I really want to talk about, though, is Dawn Eden Goldstein's Christian conversion experience. I am fascinated by such stories, and Eden's is particularly interesting.

Is Sherman Allen back on the job? So we hear ...

Pastor Sherman Allen has left the Church of God in Christ and is back in the pulpit preaching, according to several sources.

Allen, founder and pastor of Shiloh Institutional Church of God in Christ -- the name of the church, one presumes, will have to change now -- is accused in a lawsuit of beating and sexually assaulting a former church employee named Davina Kelly. Since Kelly's suit was filed early this year, numerous women have come forward with similar claims, including the allegation that Allen whacks women on the butt with a paddle as a form of spiritual discipline.

Allen's wife -- as well as several guest ministers -- had been holding down the pulpit while Allen was under suspension by the Memphis-based Church of God in Christ, the biggest Pentecostal denomination in the United States. Allen's suspension precluded him from carrying out any pastoral duties as COGIC awaited the outcome of the Kelly lawsuit.

In 1991 -- "eight years before my conversion," she says -- Dawn Eden was 23 and, ahem, sharing a bed with Buzzcocks Pete Shelley and Steve Diggle.

Dawn Eden is taking the train to Washington, D.C., and we are talking about masturbation. Just before the connection goes bad, she suggests that we tone down the conversation a bit. A man across from her has just licked his lips lasciviously. As her phone cuts out, all I hear is the word "Gross!"

We pick up the conversation later and get disconnected several more times, but along the way I hear about Eden's journey from agnostic Jew to born-again Protestant to Roman Catholic -- is that what it means to hit for the cycle? -- and this former music writer's most famous transformation of all, from a casual sex-indulgent hipster to, in the various memorable epithets of Gawker, "chastity slut Dawn Eden"; "Catholic loonytune Dawn Eden"; "relentless self-promoter/professional hymen-regenerator Dawn Eden"; and, my favorite, "Crazed Christ-Loving Re-Virgin" Dawn Eden.

It's been a year now since Eden's book, The Thrill of the Chaste: Finding Fulfillment While Keeping Your Clothes On, hit stores, and the 39-year-old writer and former print journalist is traveling the country anew talking about chastity, which, I find out, isn't to be confused with abstinence. (Later.) Tomorrow she'll speak to Catholic ladies at the Women for the Third Millennium breakfast at 9:30 a.m. at the Cooper Guest Lodge Hotel in North Dallas. Then it's on to numerous other engagements, including one in Dublin, Ireland -- she rattles off a long list of stops. Dawn Eden, evidently, is hot.

"Who knew that so many people around the world would be interested in learning not to have sex?" she says.

A few Neiman Marcus-related items this morning, chief among them the news released this a.m. that August revenues are up, from $264 million last year to $283 mil this annum -- and, like, whew. And lookit what sells: "designer handbags, shoes, designer jewelry, women’s fine apparel and men’s." Hunh. Never would have guessed.

Also, Gridskipper -- the self-described "urban travel guide" -- pays a visit to the downtown Dallas flagship, in honor of the store's 100th anniversary. And I do like this tribute to the Zodiac Room:

I think if I had a terminal disease and "Make A Wish" shined on me, I would just order a bounce house full of the Zodiac's humongous, pillow-like popovers, strip naked, jump in, and coat everything with a fire hydrant filled with the Zodiac's strawberry butter. Then I would eat until I keeled over.

Hey, hey, Paula -- Bible Girl's losing faith in you.

I learned everything I need to know about living a sexually pure life in the ghetto. You heard me right.

I came to a tough neighborhood -- to a black Pentecostal church in the heart of South Dallas -- with all my white middle-class notions intact. Couldn't help it. I was raised that way. One notion was that I could have some innocent relationships with guy friends, even after I got married. Never mind that the past friendships I’d filed in that category weren't quite as innocent as I wanted to think they were; in South Dallas, I ran smack up against an ironclad belief that there is no innocent context whatsoever for a close friendship between a grown man and a grown woman. It is always assumed, Ghetto 101 here, that something is going on.

And you know what? Two decades of experience later, I totally agree. Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the time, something is going on.

Here's another one that my South Dallas church training bludgeoned into my thick head: A woman shouldn't be calling another woman's husband without the wife's permission. Yes, there are a few exceptions, but if you have to ask, you’re the kind of person who’s looking for loopholes. “Don’t let your good be spoken of as evil,” my leaders would always tell me, alluding to Romans 14:16.

This week, Bible Girl turns to Jared Binder, a graduate student at Dallas Theological Seminary and a Dallas Observer intern, for thoughts on the "deadly sin" no one ever talks about in church. Bible Girl posts from Bible Girl will be sparse in the next few weeks; I'm working on something for the paper version of Unfair Park.

The Bible Belt may not be expanding, but the waistlines of its residents are. It seems that the highest rates of obesity in the nation are in the East South Central part of the United States, according to ObesityinAmerica.org. That would include Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi and Tennessee. A very close second to that is the West South Central states of Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and, you guessed it, Texas.

For those of us who live in the Bible Belt and actually believe the Bible, the news gets even worse. A 1998 study by Purdue University titled American Changing Lives showed that some religious groups such as Baptists and fundamentalists were more likely to be overweight than nonreligious people.

“The other thing that was very clear from the data is that there are certain religious practice issues that are very consequential,” says Purdue sociology professor Kenneth Ferraro, citing a more recent study. “We found that people who consume lots of religious media, TV and radio were more likely to be obese and actually to develop obesity over the study period.”

Janice Mixon -- prophetess and, get this, former Dallas Police Department Officer of the Year. Which makes sense, when you think about it.

Life is complicated. That's all I can say for certain after hearing one of Pastor Sherman Allen's prized "daughters" in ministry, Prophetess Janice Mixon, preach last Thursday night in the Dallas area.

Now Prophetess Mixon -- OK, fellow evangelicals, don't let the label "prophetess" throw you for a Texas Giant loop, it's a Pentecostal thing and you wouldn't understand -- is someone whose ministry I've followed for many years. And Sister Girl can preach. In my 17 years scouring many corners of the Dallas-Fort Worth church scene, I'd rate her as one of Dallas' very finest home-grown preachers.

Her background is a humble one. She was one of the middle offspring in a large working-class Dallas family -- can't remember the exact number of kids, but we're talking big family here -- and she tells some hilarious, poignant, achy tales about how they managed to survive, somehow with shoes for everyone.

Mixon was raised Baptist, but somewhere along there some Pentecostals got a hold of her -- Church of God in Christ folk, if I’m not mistaken -- and she stepped into her prophetic calling. In practical terms, being a prophetess for Mixon means preaching, followed by specific "words" for individuals and ministries that the Holy Spirit impresses upon her heart. She also teaches about intercessory prayer. Nothing spooky, OK?

This week, guest writer Renea Overstreet, a third-year law student at Texas Wesleyan and author of the novel Always a Bridesmaid, talks about her uneasiness as an African-American visitor at predominantly white churches.

The very first Bible Girl quiz immediately follows.

For Pastor Sherman Allen, things just got a little bit worse.

A Christian credit union has filed a motion in bankruptcy court asking permission to foreclose on the building that houses Pastor Sherman Allen's Shiloh Institutional Church of God in Christ, at 1270 Woodhaven Blvd. in Fort Worth. The Evangelical Christian Credit Union, based in California, finances church construction projects and purchases of church buildings, among other services. Shiloh owes the credit union $3.8 million.

The credit union filed two motions in mid-April that paint a perilous financial picture of Shiloh, founded by Pastor Allen in 1983. In late January, Allen was sued for allegedly beating and sexually abusing a former church member, Davina Kelly. Since that suit was filed, some 35 women have come forth with similar allegations dating as far back as 1983, according to Kelly's attorneys. For earlier stories on the Allen case, see here. Less than a week after the Kelly case was filed, Shiloh declared bankruptcy.

If I've seen a motif in the numerous interviews I've done for the Sherman Allen story, it is human wreckage. A trail of broken marriages. Shattered parental bonds. Severe emotional distress; even claims that folks have gone crazy. And, most of all among the people who've tangled with Allen in some way, extreme disillusionment with the church, with church leaders and even with God.

Now let me say this before I turn a corner. I see no biblical justification whatsoever for a believer to remain under the leadership of a sexually immoral pastor. I see instead much evidence that one should never do so. See here, here and here.

I don't care if your grandma's nameplate is on the front pew; if the leaders are involved in sexual mess and you've seen evidence -- "every matter may be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses" -- you ought to wait for the shouting music, then grab a corner of your long dress, slap your feathered hat on your head and jerk on out the emergency exit. Leave your frilly hanky behind; do like Joseph, Sister. Remember, sin is contagious: A little leaven will work its way through the whole loaf. You might not end up doing any of those bad things yourself, but your expectations -- your trust in God, his Word and his servants -- will take a severe beating. You may or may not recover.

To all those folks I've talked to, allow me to say this: Don't give up on God. His Word is still true, and, as my spiritual leaders always remind me, there still are people trying to live a godly life, and some of them are actually pastors and preachers.

Does God really care about our sex lives? So asks a Bible Girl reader who’s wondering why this column has often dealt with sexual topics. (Do keep this in mind: I did not invent the Sherman Allen story. I couldn’t make that stuff up if I tried.)

The answer is an emphatic yes, and you might be surprised how much of the Bible concerns itself with sex.

You have a Hebrew love poem, "Song of Songs," depicting in surprisingly explicit detail the passionate love between a man and his bride (“Blow on my garden, that its fragrance may spread abroad. Let my lover come into his garden, and taste its choice fruits.” Uh…yeah. I mean, Yeah.). On another interpretive level, the Song represents how God woos his Beloved -- his people. He initiates perfect love, and we, his Bride, receive it and respond to it. But let’s not get all spiritual and miss the obvious sexual dimension, OK?

This week: The breadth and depth of the Sherman Allen case; and the blind prophetess

Just how big is the Sherman Allen case? Well, here’s the tally of alleged victims who’ve come forward to date: 35. Many emerged after the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and The Dallas Morning News (which had been sitting on the story for months) reported on the case recently.

Both followed the news -- you read it here first -- that the Church of God in Christ’s presiding bishop had suspended Allen from “all national and local pastoral roles and activities within the Church of God in Christ.”

Thirty-five sounds like a lot of women. But, as Bible Girl has noted several times, Allen’s penchant for whacking young women with a paddle has been the worst-kept secret in the local black Pentecostal scene for many years.