Preacher Man

 

I have a Sunday morning ritual I’ve long enjoyed, though sometimes I wonder whether it’s the routine I enjoy: an endless pot of tea and feasting on the various news outlets. These range from BBC, Sky, Al Jazeera, GB news and before was banned, Russia Today. And then one day whilst channel hopping, I stumbled upon CNBC one programme in particular or rather a man, Dr Charles Stanley. 

In a lined, teak coloured face, silvery hair and dark, well cut suit, he looked to be in his eighties, and he spoke with both gravity and authority. It was the first time I’d seen a preacher man since my student days when we witnessed the strutting, striding, thigh-slapping Morris Cerullo in the Brangwyn Hall, Swansea. The contrast was startling, akin to comparing an evangelical Napoleon speaking Bronx to a Werther Mint sucking uncle.

Whatever, the 25-minute break, replacing Russia Today, has become a welcome palate cleanser after the earnestness of Al Jazeera and the inanities of Sky. The words are familiar, the lessons nothing I don’t already know but it makes for strangely riveting viewing. 

There is Charles Stanley himself. Born in 1932 he preached for over 49 years, dying on the 18^th of April 2023. And yet, despite his death, In Touch Ministries, the organisation he founded, still broadcasts his sermons and lives on after him.

The sheer longevity of the man allows you to make other, interesting comparisons, between the jaunty certainty of a sprightly forty-year-old, to the more measured preacher man in a well-cut black suit, and with a deeper certainty, one honed by his own challenges in life and ploughing the same furrow for nearly fifty years. 

                                                                   Preaching at 85

One of those challenges involved Anna, his wife from 1955 –1993 who divorced him. Initially and perhaps cynically, I assumed he’d been caught out in affair, which in a sense he had been—with God or with In Touch Ministries at least. Her grounds were that he had put religion before her, and she had seen little of him over the yearsw. Chastened, he tried to reclaim what he may have taken for granted but found he had left it too late. St Paul was probably wise not to have married.

Another, and I confess a more trivial for watching, lies in the slow camera shots of audiences of all ages and colour. Spanning the seventies and eighties, to the first two decades of the C21st the cameras allow you glimpses of changing fashion, from power shoulders and big hair to the more subtle and subdued styles of later years. 

The fashion notes are trivial. Less trivial is what I see as a factor common to every era. It’s the faces. Faces caught in rapt attention. Many are young, even attractive. Others are old and middle-aged, wrinkled, gaunt or plump. All though have the indefinable beauty of a soul reflected in the face, something you rarely see in a rock concert, a comedy show or political rally—which brings me nicely back to the news and the carefully curated masks of politicians smoothly avoiding the truth or answering the question.