Halleluhah! Praise the Lord!

A young ex-marine with a guitar sang nasally:

Life is like a mountain railroad

With an engineer that's brave;

We must make the run successful--From the cradle to the grave. . . .

See that Christ is your conductor!

His listeners accompanied him with clapping hands and stamping feet. They had gathered, as they did three times a week, in their curtained store-front church to worship God and seek the kingdom of heaven. Detroit's Home Missionaries Gospel Mission is typical of nearly 2,000 store-front congregations in the Detroit area, and of uncounted thousands across the land.

The Home Missionaries Gospel Mission, like the others, fits the oldtime revivalist tradition. ("Hallelujah!--Praise the Lord!--Jesus, Jesus!" resound through their halls.)

Peckerwood Mystics. These tiny congregations represent obscure sects with a fertile confusion of names--the Pentecostal Fire-Baptized Holiness Church, Hephzibah Faith Missionary Association, Pillar of Fire, Church of Daniel's Band, etc. Observers classify them in three main types, often overlapping: 1) Pentecostal, teaching that the Holy Spirit floods the believer in his ecstasy and that the Lord speaks to and through him; 2) Holiness, believing that absolute purity is possible for the Saved upon earth, and distinguishing sharply between the small sect of the Saved and the world (Babylon); 3) Millenarian, looking for the imminent Second Coming, Armageddon, the thousand-years reign and the end of the world.

During the depression of the '30s these sects flourished among the "disinherited classes." The war quickened the trend by drawing thousands of deeply religious rural and small-town folk to the industrial cities of the north and west. They brought with them the frontier traditions of revivalism, of freedom from church discipline, of peckerwood blood-&-fire mysticism. Their churches are numbered among the fastest growing in the U.S.

Says Theologian Walter M. Horton of Oberlin: they feel that "the traditional churches have gone stale, dead, flat.

. . The Methodist Church . . .used to be full of Pentecostal fire, and [its] public worship was filled with shouts of 'Amen' and 'Hallelujah.' Now the Nazarene and Pentecostal preachers often say that if the Methodists were as Pentecostal as they used to be, they would be glad to be Methodists, but as it is. . . ."

Horton adds: "There is a widespread hunger for security and hope in a world where everything is unsettled, and the threat of atomic war hangs over us all. In such a world men seek for deep, intimate fellowship--at least with one another, at best with that which is eternal and indestructible. In the small sects, many seem to find both kinds of fellowship."

At the Federal Council of Churches meeting last March, speakers warned of the competition of this emotional religion, admitted that "the store-front churches have 'beat us to the draw' in many communities." Reason: the inadequacy, both social and spiritual, of old-line churches.

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