Mysterious Ways

People sway and tap their feet to the rhythm of his words. A tiny, superannuated woman dances in the aisles. A heavyset woman in an electric-blue blouse interrupts Ferree's sermon with a long, sonorous declamation in tongues. Ferree falls silent to let her speak. "God is in this room," he says. "Speak to us, oh Lord."

Ferree himself was not always such an eager vessel for the Holy Spirit. He usually discloses, as part of his sermonic repertoire, that he was a drug user and pusher in his twenties, and was twice shot in drug deals: "One was self-inflicted, I was high on heroin. I had a loaded .38 in my pocket, and I accidentally shot myself in the knee." During another botched transaction in San Antonio, Ferree was buying drugs from a dealer who insisted on taking Ferree's money up front before going to get the drugs. When Ferree protested, he says, the man offered to leave his associate in the car as collateral and handed Ferree a gun. "He said, 'If I don't come back, shoot my friend.' I said, 'Okay, that'll work.'"

The dealer vanished with the money, leaving Ferree, his friends, and their hostage in an awkward spot. Soon after, Ferree says, the hostage pulled out his own pistol and "went to shooting" in the moving car. A bullet penetrated Ferree's back, collapsed his lung and lodged against his ribs, where it lies today. But Ferree managed to put a loaded pistol to the head of the man who'd shot him. "I cocked the hammer, and a voice which I now believe was the voice of Jesus said, 'Don't kill the guy,' so I ended up letting him live." For months after, Ferree says, the voice continually revisited him, ultimately compelling him out of addiction and into a 30-year career as a man of God.

At Jesus Way Temple, Ferree's sermon is winding down. "If you need prayer," he says, his forehead glistening, "come up here and let us lay hands on you."

The congregants come forward, seeking prayer for, among other things, back trouble, ill will toward others and poor schoolwork. When the altar call subsides, the congregants resume their seats, wearing expressions of exhaustion and relief, like people deplaning after a crash landing.

Ferree looks drained, himself. "Thank you, Lord, for stopping by this little church in Washington, D.C.," he says, his eyes shut tightly. "Thank you, Lord."

Then he adds: "Please friends, help me with an offering. This is how I pay my bills; this is how I stay on the field, serving the Lord."

People come forward with ones, fives and tens, but mostly ones. He accepts the modest collection and flashes his mammoth smile. Tomorrow he'll be on the road again, preaching at a church in Aberdeen, Md. "Come on by, friends, and wear your shouting shoes."

To an outsider, people who come to Mike Ferree's meetings might look like esoteric throwbacks to an antique, backwater faith; in fact, they're members of a new global religious vanguard. With more than 530 million followers across the globe (and 20 million in the United States alone), Pentecostalism and its interdenominational offshoot, the charismatic movement, have seen the most explosive growth of any Christian tradition in the world in the last 100 years. One-quarter of all Christians worldwide reportedly attend Pentecostal or charismatic churches, with the strongest growth in South America and elsewhere in the Third World.

Pentecostal churches have spread in China, Japan and Korea, where pastor David Yonggi Cho's Yoido Full Gospel Church (Seoul) lists a membership of more than 700,000, which would make it the largest church in the world. Though the tradition is barely a century old, Pentecostalism is far and away the most significant religious movement to emerge from the United States.

Yet American Pentecostalism is beginning to re-semble less and less the rough-hewn folk movement that helped propel it to global prominence. A tradition that was born in warehouses, home meetings and open-air revivals throughout the rural South, Pentecostalism now boasts some of the largest and wealthiest churches in America. The character of the faith appears to be shifting, too. Many of the movement's highest-profile personalities -- megachurch pastors such as Joyce Meyer, T.D. Jakes, Creflo Dollar and Joel Osteen -- enjoy parallel careers as best-selling authors of Biblically grounded self-help books and personal prosperity literature (sample title from Creflo Dollar: No More Debt!: God's Strategy for Debt Cancellation).

"The question is, will success spoil Pentecostalism," says Harvey Cox, professor of divinity at Harvard University and author of numerous books on the Pentecostal and charismatic movements. "In this country at least, [the movement's] turned quite affluent and glitzy. One wonders what's going to happen to the ministry that was so characteristic of the movement?"