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congregants’ interior emotional world by modeling the self on God, or on the self as seen from God’s loving perspective. One of the most important was prayer ministry, where the person for whom the prayer is given is often crying and in visible pain; those around the person are offering prayers which describe the ways in which the sobbing person is loved by God. Another was treating prayer like a psychotherapy session. One congregant explained: “It’s just like talking to a therapist, especially in the beginning when you’re revealing things that are deep in your heart and deep in your soul, the things that have been pushed down and denied.” In these churches which emphasize God’s love and intimacy, hell and fear largely disappear.

The central demand of these learning practices is to use one’s own mental experience as evidence and content for the responsive presence of this God, who is believed to be other than oneself, and to use pretend play to integrate those mental events into a representation that is persuasively external to the self. The emotional practices provide both direct evidence of God’s love and, more generally, evidence that participation in church is satisfying and worthwhile. In effect the process asks the congregants to carve God out of their own experience and to experience those phenomena as other; and it uses the emotional practices taught by the church and the social world of the congregation to help them hold that God separate and apart and lovingly responsive.

This is hard work to do, and not everyone was able to do it, or to do it easily. Here two congregants describe their difficulty in experiencing God directly despite their efforts.

Jake: “I remember desperately wanting to draw closer to God, and [to have] one of these inspired Holy Spirit moments … I wanted those [experiences] and I sought them out, but I never found myself encountering them”

Irene: “I don’t understand the gift of prophecy completely. I’ll probably never will and I don’t have it and I don’t want it because it would scare me.”

Here is another congregant who has been able to do so:

Nora: “It was pretty early on in my relationship with him. I was just all full of myself one morning. I just had wonderful devotions and worships and just felt so close. I went out, and it was the most god-awful day. It was icy rain and gray and cold and it was sleeting. I’m just full of the joy of the Lord, and I say, “God, I praise you that it isn’t snowing, and that nothing’s accumulating, and that the streets aren’t icy”—and then I went around the corner, and I hit a patch of ice, and just about went down. It was so funny to me. I just burst out laughing out loud. It was just so funny that he would put me in my place in such a slapstick personal kind of way. But then he just graced me the rest of the morning. The bus showed up right away, which it never does. I was reading, and I missed my stop to get off, and I heard God say, “Get off the bus.” I looked up and hollered, and the bus actually stopped, half a block on, to let me get off. I just felt that intimacy all morning. Like when you go from holding a new boyfriend’s hand to kissing him goodnight ….”

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