When Lizzy got back, she went to work almost immediately, searching through every dark corner of the church for potential converts. "I mean," she told people, "what's wrong with expressing your faith like that? "I mean," she said, "how can anybody try to quench the Spirit?" "I mean," she said, "how long has it been since there's been even a glow in ‘First Church of the Ice Box?’"--meaning Lakeside, the consistory understood. Lizzy and Arn Sibbelink came back from their trip up north converted and dedicated their summer to getting Lakeside Church to take a pilgrimage toward righteousness by way of heavenward hands. Renewal was what they called it–and it started just that easily, with the raising of hands.
What the consistory understood was that Arn and Liz Sibbelink are the kind of people who mean well but not the real movers and shakers in Lakeside Church. Nobody’s ever forgotten the time Arn lead a hymn sing with such outrageous zealousness that nobody sang, worried as they were about a public coronary behind the pulpit. The Sibbelinks, the consistory knew, were the kinds of people who want to lead so bad they can’t.
So that night, quite late in fact, the consistory faced a problem: a quarter of the church (estimates varied) wanted to follow the Sibbelinks’ lead and lift their hands on high; what was left thought raising hands the way they did was just fine if somebody’d just kicked a field goal, but as a gesture of joy was better left somewhere close to the 50-yard line.
“What are we going to do?” Wilmot said, although nary a person around that table needed an explanation. “We got the uppers and the downers here,” he said, “and never the twain shall meet.”
Elder Swart didn’t know what to say. He leaned back, looked up at the picture of his father with the former pastors, and wished he could have one of those fat black cigars old-time consistories used to savor in silence right in this room. Of course, now there were women, he thought--but then who knows? Maybe tonight, with this hand-raising business, they'd be frustrated enough to join in a stogie.
"I don't like it," Vander Toppen said, breaking the silence. "It puts people in a swoon. Last week Herman Fry almost passeed out, I swear. There he stood, like he had grown antennae." He tossed his eyes up in the air. "You know, Pastor," he said, "you got to cut down on numbers of verses, or people'll start dropping right in the pews."
“You can't tell people how they can or can't express themselves,” Nikki Ferris said. “If the Spirit's in them, then they're going to raise their hands. We've got no business trying to stanch what the Spirit's up to." Silence.
Of course, everybody knows Ferris and her husband raise their hands.
"What I want to know," Elder Wilmot said finally, "is why the Spirit works like a virus?" He put both elbows up on the table. "We'd never have had a problem here if the Sibbelinks hadn't visited up north." At that moment he raised both hands himself. "Go ahead–tell me it's the Holy Spirit in all of them. Maybe I’ll buy that, but answer me this: how is it the Holy Spirit got to work like a hula hoop. The whole thing smells like a fad to me."
"Whatever the reason," Jeannette Ludinga said, "we can't tell people they can't do it in worship. We have to face that fact." She twisted her pen between her fingers as she spoke. "I'm not excited about it myself," she said, "but we're not about to ask the ushers to remove people who lift their hands."
"Of course not," Wilmot said, and the way he moved his jaw reminded Swart that the old man had a pinch of tobacco tucked behind his lower lip. "But that doesn't mean I like it," he said. "It sets up a hierarchy. That's what we're seeing now. Some do it, some don't. Those that do are blessed–maybe I’ll buy that–but those that don't are either full of guilt because they can't do it or mad as heck at those who do for creating all the stink. We got war, boys," he said, forgetting about the women around the table. "We got war here, and we got to do something about it."
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"Bring an end to such madness," you're saying, and I will. But we need to return one more time to the worship wars at Lakeside Church.
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