Mysterious Ways

Eller smiles and shakes his head abashedly, as though there is something faintly obscene about the idea of a Caribbean cruise.

"This is it right here," Ferree says. "It's all we do."

At 8 o'clock, services begin downstairs in the worship hall.

It's an oblong, irregularly shaped room. The ceiling is low, bristling with tiny crags of stucco, which Ferree is in danger of scraping his head on when he stands before the pulpit. Ferree looks at the crowd of 15 that is scattered through the pews, mostly African American women in their middle years. "If you was in Jerusalem," he says, "right now, tonight, in the tomb where Jesus laid 2,000 years ago, you couldn't get one bit closer than you can get in this room tonight."

"Help him, Lord," one woman says.

"Tell it," says another.

"How many knows there's nowhere on Earth that God's any greater than He is in this room?"

"Tell the truth."

"I'm trying," he says.

Ferree unspools his long, unscripted sermon, which begins with a kind of lollygagging comic overture, riffing on the woes of parenting and married life, and takes an occasional swipe at the celebrity clergy -- "that bunch that comes to bleed widows dry, to buy another jet, to put another wing on their house."

Ferree's delivery swells in an intensity that spreads ineluctably throughout the room. Trembling thickets of hands go up. Aggrieved moans drift through the church. Ferree's features begin to broaden and harden, and his phrases pour out in an impassioned torrent: He winces, clutches the microphone. "Oh God," he says, and then goes into a brief bout of tongues.

"O-ta-shalamba-ambalabahai-atamba-lalabahai."