Getting Back Double from God

On a wet winter night, the neon signs of Crouch Temple glow with a lonely halo in the Los Angeles mist. Central Avenue, not far from the scene of the 1965 Watts riots, is quiet. But inside the temple, a converted theater, the night is alive. Some 2,000 people--black, white and brown--are turned toward the stage, crying "Hallelujah" and "God be praised!" For more than an hour the tension has been building up. Testimonies, gospel songs, pledges, blessings, and more songs--a writhing, Presleyan, shirt-open gospel rock driven home by an organ, drums and piano combo. Women are swaying in the aisles, men clapping and shouting from their seats.

Suddenly, bouncing out of his chair, comes the star. Evangelist A. A. Allen is dressed in a conservative style tonight: the usual iridescent lavender suit has given way to a blue blazer and grey slacks. But the crowd knows him as "God's Man of Faith and Power," and they also know that something powerful is coming. "We need six strong men to help bring out this stretcher," he shouts. Half a dozen eager volunteers spring into the wings to bring out an ambulance stretcher carrying a groaning black woman. "This woman was brought into the hospital this morning with third-degree burns over her body," reads an attending nurse. "She was home, high on dope, when her clothes caught fire in the kitchen."

Please, Jesus. "This is a sad story," says Allen, in his raspy Ozark baritone. He bends over the victim. "Do you believe God can raise you up?" Weakly, evincing great pain, she answers. "Yes, I do believe." "Raise your hands to ward this woman and pray," he commands the crowd. Four thousand arms shoot into the air. In the back, a little man caresses his Bible. "Please, sweet Jesus. Please, Jesus," he repeats. As the people pray, Allen lays his hands on the victim. "Heal!" he cries. "Heal her wounds in the name of Jeee-uh-zuss!" Already, the crowd is murmuring "Thank you, Jesus." The woman sits up. "Oh, thank God," she says. The nurse, at Allen's request, trundles her off to check the wounds in the ladies' room. She is back quickly. "There is new skin covering where the burns are," she announces. "It's a miracle."

For Asa Alonso Allen, 58, the star of A. A. Allen Revivals, Inc., that was indeed enough of a miracle to set the tone for a seven-day revival meeting in Los Angeles last week, even though it was not up to his usual standard. His four-color, monthly Miracle Magazine (circ. 350,000) reports even more spectacular cures. In the current issue, a teenager named Yodonna Holley from Globe, Ariz., testifies that "I received fillings in my teeth" during a camp meeting. ("Why not let God be YOUR dentist?" suggests the story.) A young man named Charles Embrey, of Hayward, Calif., testifies that he prayed with Brother Allen and got new spinal disks. Only in the small print can a reader find the careful demurrer: "A. A. Allen Revivals, Inc. assumes no legal responsibility for the veracity of any such report." Naturally, few of the cures ever undergo the scrutiny of physicians.

Now that Oklahoma's Oral Roberts has joined the Methodist ministry and de-emphasized the curative aspects of his high-decibel revivals, Allen is probably the best-known faith healer in the nation. Although ignored by mainstream Protestant churchmen, he has a large and enthusiastic following among fundamentalist Christians in the South and Southwest. Last year alone, A. A. Allen Revivals, Inc. grossed $2,692,342--not counting the salaries of Allen and his two associate preachers, who take their cut directly from "their ministry."

Miracle Valley. Born in Arkansas, Allen was converted from Methodism to Pentecostalism in his early 20s, when he heard a woman evangelist preach in a country church, eventually became a minister with the Assemblies of God. By 1953, he was already concentrating on faith healing--and prospering. Three years later, the Assemblies of God dismissed him for failing to appear at a church trial resulting from a Tennessee drunken-driving arrest, but Allen hardly seemed to care. The same year, he organized his own Miracle Revival Fellowship, which claims to be nondenominational, but has become in effect an independent sect, headquartered in Allen's own blossoming desert town, Miracle Valley, Ariz.

Located on 1,250 acres of desert land in Arizona's Cochise County, Miracle Valley today is a teetotaling, nonsmoking oasis of evangelistic fervor and hard-nosed business. At the Miracle Valley Bible College, 100 students from as far away as the Philippines (his "special" mission territory) study the Allen brand of evangelism. In its busy headquarters building, squads of secretaries, mail clerks and printers attend the banks of file cards, automatic typewriters and offset presses that allow Allen to print and mail out more than 55 million pieces of literature every year. TV and radio technicians stand by to prepare Allen's daily radio broadcasts (58 stations) and weekly television programs (43 stations). There is a record company (47 albums of sermons and gospel music), an airstrip (Cessna 150 at the ready), and a barnlike, 3,000-capacity church to hold the faithful who come by train, plane, bus and auto to attend each of Allen's twice-yearly, 17-day camp meetings. For those who want to stay, there is even a subdivision called Miracle Valley Estates, where the modest homes are dominated by Allen's own twelve-sided house of wood and cut stone, with a swimming pool under a simulated stained-glass canopy.

On the Road. Most of the time, though, Allen, his assistant ministers, and a handful of trusted aides are on the road, moving from meeting to meeting in a caravan of five huge moving vans brightly labeled "A. A. Allen Revivals." Advance men have prepared the way for them, enlisting local ministers, mostly from Pentecostal churches, to share the stage with Allen, rejoice in the cures, and give a little pitch for their own services. Allen's specialty, along with the cures, is the $100 pledge, and the hard sell is usually made by one of his assistants. "The Scriptures say you got to vow and pay, vow and pay, vow and pay," Brother Don Stewart exhorted the Crouch Temple crowd last week. "You got to promise God, and you got to keep the promise. If you want him to lift your pain, to make you whole, to bring you joy, you got to have faith. Faith. And faith is to vow and pay."

Of course, they do--though many vow and only some pay. One night last week, such a pitch brought 35 pledges to the Allen altar on the first try--a cool $3,500 if the pledges are all filled. Allen, of course, is well aware that some ministers are offering to release guilty souls from their pledges in return for much smaller offerings. Some of his most fiery recriminations are reserved for these "racketeering preachers" who question his healings and seek to undermine his message to the faithful: that God will doubly repay whoever gives without limit.

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