THREE

A Song for the Desperate

ALTHOUGH THE THEATER ON Flatbush seemed a treasure to us, it was in wretched shape. We spent more than $250,000 fixing it up before we could move in, in January 1979. That was when things really began to take off spiritually.

We had been in the Flatbush building less than a year when someone with connections to a Manhattan recording studio came along and suggested that the choir do what is called a “custom album”—a low-budget production for our own use. We did that in 1980, with Carol composing three or four of the ten works.

Somehow copies made their way to Nashville, and music companies began to approach us. Word Music repackaged the first album and offered it for sale across the country. They soon asked us to do two more. The choir ended up recording with everyone from Larnelle Harris to Babbie Mason to Wayne Watson to the Talleys to West Coast praise and worship leader Morris Chapman.

On Sundays it was not unusual for the choir to sing and testify with such anointing that a spirit of praise would descend on the people, changing the whole direction of the meeting. Once the choir had planned to do three songs. To introduce the second one, a former drug addict gave his testimony. There was such a powerful sense of God’s love that I couldn’t help walking up as the song was ending, putting one arm around the fellow, and making an invitation right then for people to receive Christ. The response was immediate and strong.

The choir never got around to singing the third song—but after all, why should we hang onto some order of service if people were willing to get saved? God could use the choir, or anyone else, to turn the whole service into a prayer meeting if he wished.

BACK FROM THE “DEAD”

AMONG THE MANY PEOPLE whom the Lord touched in those days—initially through the choir but also through the Tuesday night prayer meeting—one who stands out was a slender, red-haired young woman named Roberta Langella. Her story is so amazing, I will let her tell it:

I WAS BORN THE fourth of six children in Brooklyn and raised on Staten Island. My father was a longshoreman who provided a good living and a Catholic education for all of us. I was happy to be part of what I thought was a stable, loving home.

But then, when I was only eleven, the wheels came off. All of a sudden, we were moving to Florida to be near my mother’s parents. The only trouble was, Dad wasn’t coming with us. I had failed to recognize the tension that had developed between my parents and had ruptured their marriage.

I just couldn’t believe what was happening. Our family had always stuck together. If you couldn’t rely on grown-ups to do the right thing, what was life all about anyway? I was shattered.

Within a year or two, I was acting out my unhappiness by drinking and smoking pot. My mom remarried, which only made matters worse as far as I was concerned. We fought all the time. At age sixteen I came back to New York to live with my dad for a year. That wasn’t much better; I dropped out of school and took off to crisscross the country on my own.

A year later, I was back in New York living with a man twice my age. I just wanted somebody—anybody—to love me and take care of me. Unfortunately, this guy was an IV drug abuser. Before long, we were both on cocaine and then heroin. I ended up overdosing several times.

One terrible night in 1980 I shot up so many drugs that people said my heart actually stopped beating. My boyfriend took off, afraid that I had died and that he’d be left to answer incriminating questions. I was abandoned on that rooftop, turning blue … but by God’s grace someone discovered me and called 911. The paramedics came and revived me.

I felt so bad about myself, I was sure nobody thought I was worth anything. That led to one destructive relationship after another. Around 1982 my then current boyfriend and I rented a second-floor apartment above a florist shop next door to the Brooklyn Tabernacle. Of course, we hadn’t the slightest interest in what went on there.

My boyfriend was abusive; he punched me out regularly. One day he beat me so badly he broke my eardrum. But every time it happened I would plead, “Don’t leave me.” It was so pathetic! But worse than being beaten, worse than being hated, was the terrifying thought of being left alone. I couldn’t stand it.

I remember one Sunday afternoon when I was so distraught I threatened him. “I’m going to take my life,” I said. Sprawled out on the couch, watching a football game, he didn’t look up. “I’m watching the Jets now. Talk to me at halftime.” He didn’t even care!

I somehow kept functioning, working as a bartender in nightclubs. I was totally into the punk culture of the eighties—featuring the “dead look,” where I didn’t brush my hair for a month.

I remember frequenting “shooting galleries,” where twenty or thirty people were getting high all at once, sharing needles. Although I was afraid of the consequences of sharing those needles, I was even more desperate for the drugs.

After the Greenwich Village bars closed in the early hours of the morning, I would proceed to the after-hours scene, which is crazy even to the crazy people. You really don’t want to know the outrageous and violent things that go on in the clubs, lasting even past sunup.

Finally I would head home. As I would walk up out of the subway in my black leather jacket, there would be a sidewalk full of church people—all waiting to get into the Tabernacle. I would grit my teeth as I walked past. All their happy faces made me so angry!

Pushing through the crowd, I’d dash upstairs as fast as I could. The only trouble was, my bedroom window faced the alley toward the church, and I couldn’t escape the music coming through the walls … songs like “How Jesus Loves” and “I’m Clean.” I’d listen to the melodies and sometimes break down. Something in the music would touch me, even though I didn’t want to be touched.

But go inside the church? No way. I was sure Jesus could never love someone as strung out as I was.

Before long, my boyfriend and I split up—as usual—and I moved on to another relationship, another apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Sometimes I’d hear the woman one floor below singing in the shower. I met her in the hall one day and said, “I hear you singing sometimes. Are you a musician?”

“No, not really. I just sing in a choir at my church, and I like to practice the songs at home.”

“What church is that?” I asked.

“The Brooklyn Tabernacle.”

I had moved away, but that church kept moving in on me.

Meanwhile, the drug and alcohol abuse intensified. At times we had no food in the house; the phone was turned off. We started selling furniture in order to finance my drug habit. Somehow, though, I always held onto a job. All-night highs wouldn’t keep me from getting up in the morning and going to work.

One evening at a friend’s house, I broke down crying. For the first time in my life, I said, “You know, I think I might have a drug problem.” That was the understatement of the decade, but an important first step for me.

Over the next few days I zeroed in on what I felt had to be the cause of my problems: my boyfriend. His drug use was a bad influence on me, right? So I kicked him out.

Within a few weeks, I had a new live-in boyfriend who didn’t do drugs. Instead, he was a dealer! He’d bring pounds of cocaine into the house. Obviously, I kept using.

One night I called my mother in Florida, who by then had become a Christian. I started talking about my life—and couldn’t stop. I don’t know how she managed it, but she replied calmly to my agonized self-revelations by inviting me to come down and spend a couple of days with her.

Those few days in Florida stretched out to fourteen months. My mom got me into Narcotics Anonymous, and I went clean. I also managed, after all the years, to get my GED—my General Equivalency Diploma. Things were finally looking up, and I was sure I could conquer the world. But my newfound confidence came crashing down all too soon.

A visit to the doctor unveiled a horrible fact: I was HIV-positive. After all the needle-sharing over the years, I shouldn’t have been surprised. But I became furious at this news, coming just as I was trying hard to get my act together. I was mad at myself and at God.

I returned to New York and started my own business. In the meantime, my brother Stephen had found the Lord and began witnessing to me, but I brushed him off. Finally I agreed to go with him to the Brooklyn Tabernacle, insisting on sitting in the balcony, arriving late and leaving early.

It was only a matter of time until the siren call of drugs broke through my resolve. I lapsed back into the world of crack cocaine after two years of living clean. Inside, the old feelings of embarrassment and shame rose up again. But I just couldn’t help it. I wanted the rush of drugs more than I wanted to keep struggling with life alone.

Finally I hit bottom, at the end of a five- or six-day crack binge. It was a Tuesday night when I ran out of money. For some reason I drove to the church—I don’t know why. That night I found myself at the altar shedding tears I couldn’t stop. “Oh, God, I need you in my life. Help me, please!” It was the moment of final surrender for me. From that point on, I began to believe God loved me. And with this newfound faith came hope and a slowly growing confidence.

A year later, I was actually singing in the very same choir I had so resented! My life was on steady ground after so much turmoil. I knew—I really knew down deep—that God loved me and accepted me and I could relax in his love. I was free of the chains that had bound me for so many years.

WE DIDN’T DISCOVER THIS wonderful miracle of God’s grace until Roberta quietly sent Carol a seven-page letter. It was Easter time, and we were in the thick of planning a concert. Carol sat down to read this letter one evening and within minutes was weeping. “Jim—you have to stop and read this,” she insisted, handing me the first page and then the next and the next. Soon I was in tears along with her.

When we finished, we looked at each other and said, “This is amazing. She has to tell her story at the Easter concert.” Roberta had never spoken in public before, but she gamely agreed to try.

The day came, and the building was jammed. She had invited all her family. Many of them, including her father in the third row, didn’t know the half of what they were about to hear.

After four choir numbers, Roberta came out of the choir, nervously picked up a microphone, and began to speak. “Hi, my name is Roberta Langella … and I want to tell you what the risen Jesus means to me.”

We had coached her to leave out a few of the most lurid details, but even so, her story was powerful. As she got to the toughest parts, she couldn’t help stopping to say, “Daddy … I know this is hard for you to hear. But I have to say it, because it shows how Jesus can forgive the worst in a person’s life.” The emotion was so incredible it took your breath away. People were on the edge of their seats.

The choir then sang the final song, and I brought the meeting to a close. The first person to the altar was Roberta’s father, sobbing profusely. Then came her uncle, her aunt, and the rest of the clan.

Today Roberta Langella heads up our ministry called “New Beginnings,” a weekly outreach to drug abusers and the homeless. She now has a hundred workers involved, riding the subway every Sunday afternoon to the shelters and rehab centers to escort people to our church for a meal and the evening meeting. The love of the Lord just exudes from her life.

Roberta is a real trooper these days, even when she doesn’t feel well. As she sits in the balcony on Sunday nights with all the homeless she has brought with her, there’s nobody too dirty, too far gone for her to care about. She sees herself in them. She is a living example of the power of God to pick up the downtrodden, the self-loathing, the addicted, and redeem them for his glory.

SECRET “FORMULA”

PROVIDING SPACE FOR PEOPLE such as Roberta and the scores of homeless she brings our way has turned out to be a perennial problem for us. In 1985 the overall growth of the church forced us to add an afternoon service at 3:30, and in early 1996, a fourth service—each of them two to two-and-a-half hours long. We have always felt we had to give the Holy Spirit time to work; we couldn’t rush people through some kind of assembly line. The worship times are now 9:00 A.M., 12:00 noon, 3:30 P.M., and 7:30 P.M.

This makes a grueling schedule, but we have no choice until we can get into a larger facility. I simply cannot abide turning people away at the door, which is what has had to happen often.

With people in the overflow room plus the lobby sitting on stackable chairs and watching TV monitors, we can accommodate at least 1,600 per meeting. This increase has occurred in spite of the fact that around 1985 we began to send groups of people out to start churches in other parts of the city: the Glendale section of Queens, the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the South Bronx, Coney Island, Harlem, and so forth. The present count stands at seven churches in the greater New York area, plus another ten elsewhere, from New Hampshire to San Francisco and even overseas.

The first groups were launched with the help of the choir through public concerts. Actually, that first concert was something of an accident. A minister in Manhattan called me one day to ask a favor. He had booked the famous Carnegie Hall, which seats 2,100, on a Wednesday night for a Christian concert—and the artist had canceled with only forty-five days to go. Was there any way our choir could fill in and somehow prevent the financial loss that would otherwise occur, since Carnegie Hall was not about to let him out of his contract?

We had never done anything like that, and we didn’t know how to go about it. Should we sell tickets? We elected to sing with no admission charge, taking an offering instead. The hall management was not happy about this arrangement but reluctantly agreed.

We began passing the word throughout the city that the Brooklyn Tabernacle Choir would premiere some of its new songs at a free concert. On the appointed day we got the shock of our lives when people began lining up outside the hall before noon! The line stretched from the door on West 57th Street up to the corner, down a full block on Seventh Avenue, around another corner along West 56th—3,500 people in all.

The next thing I knew, the New York Police Department was there with crowd-control barricades and officers on horseback. I was so embarrassed about my mishandling of the whole situation that I went inside and hid in a basement room. A stern-faced sergeant came looking for me to ask, “What’s going on here? Who caused all this?” I sheepishly admitted it was my fault.

The concert was a wonderful success. Near the end I gave a brief presentation of the gospel the choir had been singing about, then I closed with a public invitation. People readily came forward to accept Christ. We prayed with them right there and collected their names and addresses for follow-up.

A few weeks later I received a phone call from someone at Radio City Music Hall. “Why don’t you book with us next time? We seat six thousand.”

Carol and I were honored by the invitation, but there was, of course, the small matter of the charges: more than $70,000! We took a deep breath and decided to make the plunge, understandably selling tickets this time in order to cover the expense. We promoted the night as the premiere of a new album.

The tickets sold out in three days.

The next time we released a choir album, we did two nights. For the Live … With Friends album, we ventured for three nights—and sold out all three. Each choir member was committed to trying to sell fifty tickets to people at work who didn’t attend church. When a member would say, “Hey, I’m singing at Radio City Music Hall next month—would you like to buy a ticket?” people usually reacted with amazement—and an affirmative response.

Church planting became an important motive for the events. We would give away free tickets in whatever section of the city we wanted to start a church. Then during the concert we would announce, “This coming Sunday, services will begin at such-and-such a place; please join us there.”

The biggest distributor of Christian choral music in America got acquainted with us, liked the music, and sat down with Carol one day to ask: “So what’s the formula here? What makes this work?”

She began talking about the choir prayer meeting. The visitor said to himself, She didn’t understand my question. I want to know what makes the music so inspirational.

It was months before he realized that the life in the music comes from prayer. That’s the formula.

Prayer cannot truly be taught by principles and seminars and symposiums. It has to be born out of a whole environment of felt need. If I say, “I ought to pray,” I will soon run out of motivation and quit; the flesh is too strong. I have to be driven to pray.

Yes, the roughness of inner-city life has pressed us to pray. When you have alcoholics trying to sleep on the back steps of your building, when your teenagers are getting assaulted and knifed on the way to youth meetings, when you bump into transvestites in the lobby after church, you can’t escape your need for God. According to a recent Columbia University study, twenty-one cents of every dollar New Yorkers pay in city taxes is spent trying to cope with the effects of smoking, drinking, and drug abuse.

But is the rest of the country coasting along in fine shape? I think not. In the smallest village in the Farm Belt, there are still urgent needs. Every congregation has wayward kids, family members who aren’t serving God. Do we really believe that God can bring them back to himself?

Too many Christians live in a state of denial: “Well, I hope my child will come around someday.” Some parents have actually given up: “I guess nothing can be done. Bobby didn’t turn out right—but we tried; we dedicated him to the Lord when he was a baby. Maybe someday …”

The more we pray, the more we sense our need to pray. And the more we sense a need to pray, the more we want to pray.

CHECK THE VITAL SIGNS

PRAYER IS THE SOURCE of the Christian life, a Christian’s lifeline. Otherwise, it’s like having a baby in your arms and dressing her up so cute—but she’s not breathing! Never mind the frilly clothes; stabilize the child’s vital signs. It does no good to talk to someone in a comatose state. That’s why the great emphasis on teaching in today’s churches is producing such limited results. Teaching is good only where there’s life to be channeled. If the listeners are in a spiritual coma, what we’re telling them may be fine and orthodox, but unfortunately, spiritual life cannot be taught.

Pastors and churches have to get uncomfortable enough to say, “We are not New Testament Christians if we don’t have a prayer life.” This conviction makes us squirm a little, but how else will there be a breakthrough with God?

If we truly think about what Acts 2:42 says—“They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer”—we can see that prayer is almost a proof of a church’s normalcy. Calling on the name of the Lord is the fourth great hallmark in the list. If my church or your church isn’t praying, we shouldn’t be boasting in our orthodoxy or our Sunday morning attendance figures.

In fact, Carol and I have told each other more than once that if the spirit of brokenness and calling on God ever slacks off in the Brooklyn Tabernacle, we’ll know we’re in trouble, even if we have 10,000 in attendance.