It’s a sin for church to be boring

Discovery Church
Voorhees, New Jersey
November 11, 2007

I intended to visit a different church that Sunday, but I ended up at Discovery. The story of why I did not attend the other church will appear in the next installment. The reason I did attend Discovery Church is simply that I saw a sign on the road, and decided to check it out. You could say I discovered it.

The sign led me to the parking lot of Voorhees Middle School. I saw some people entering the school by way of the gymnasium, so I followed to see if they were, indeed, going to a church service.

Yup. As soon as I walk through the doors, a woman hands me a program. Christian rock is playing over the sound system. A small stage has been set up, and there are about 150 folding chairs facing it. An enormous video screen is next to the stage. There are black and white curtains behind the stage, and someone is arranging red, white, and blue bunting on a stand in the middle. In the back of the auditorium, a little area called Java Joe’s Café has been set up, where you can buy coffee, tea, pastries, bagels, etc. Two little tables with tablecloths and chairs have been placed near the café. A bookstore has been set up next to the café – large cases that open up to display books, set up on tables. There are also ladders and lights and sound equipment in the gymnasium, but I’m not sure if this is part of the church set-up, or something the school uses.

After I find a seat, a man comes over, introduces himself, and asks if I have a program. Yes, I answer.

Ten minutes before 10:00 am, a slide appears on the giant screen announcing that “Discovery starts in ten minutes.” This is followed by other informative slides about events and programs, including one reminding parents of small children to sit in the chairs to the back and right, so that they can easily slip out of the service and into the hallway if their kids become noisy. Every few minutes the time is updated – “Discover starts in five minutes . . . three minutes . . .” etc.

Another man, wearing a dark blue tee shirt, shakes my hand and greets me. He is walking through the gymnasium, shaking hands with almost everyone. There is a wide range of ages here, but almost everyone is white.

I fill out the visitor’s card in the program, so that I will be ready when the offering comes around.

By 10:00, almost every chair has been taken. People are bringing coffee and bagels to their seats. The screen switches to a short video in which two men make announcement about upcoming events. I think one of the men in the video might be the man in the blue tee shirt who shook hands with me earlier. Perhaps he is the pastor? While the video plays the band gets ready. It includes a drummer, two guitarists, a keyboard player, and a lead singer. Later they are joined by two more vocalists.

When the band begins to play, the picture on the screen switches to a background of wedding rings, upon which the lyrics are superimposed. Everyone stands, and some people clap.

This praise music is not very easy to sing along with. Congregational participation is weak (most of the people near me are not even trying, although a few are clapping). The weakness of the congregational singing is masked by the loudness of the band, much the way that a very loud organ hides weak singing in a more traditional church service. But really, the big problem here is that this style of music is not suitable for group singing. The lead singer is actually a pretty good rock vocalist, but it’s the kind of dramatic, American Idol-type singing that is very, very hard to sing as a group. Lots of melisma.

The lead guitarist, who is one of those jumping-up-and-down type of players, gets in some good licks. The lead singer gestures a lot with his pinkie and index finger extended, a rock habit that might have slightly unfortunate connotations for some people.

At one point the band instructs everyone in a kind of fast hand clapping maneuver, and this starts out well but dies off quickly. The band is very energetic, but they seem to have to work very, very hard to get the crowd moving, singing, or clapping even a little bit. I have the sense that everyone would rather just sit down and watch. (Watching, perhaps with a little arm waving, would be more appropriate to this style of music.)

At 10:20 the band stops and we are asked to turn around and say hello to our neighbors, which we do.

After that someone on stage asks us all to sit down for the next song. So we do, but as luck would have it, the first line of the next song is “We stand and lift up our hands.” Scattered groups throughout the auditorium immediately do just that – stand and lift their hands – while others remain seated. Half the congregation stands, some lifting their hands, and half sit and watch. I am willing to stand or sit, but since I happen to be in a group of sitters, I remain seated.

Then a set of slides honoring the armed forces comes up, showing men and women in the military, including a number of very touching scenes of military funerals. (Today is Veteran’s Day.)

The man in the blue tee shirt says, “They do an awesome job of serving us. It’s amazing and humbling.”

At 10:30 the lead singer, now playing the keyboard, does a nice bluesy-rock version of Amazing Grace. It think it’s supposed to be a solo (there’s no way anyone could sing with him on most of it - again, lots of melisma), but a few members of the congregation try to join in on the second verse.

Next – what’s this? A short clip from an old Popeye cartoon appears on the screen! Popeye is getting married to Olive Oyl, and he needs to fortify himself with spinach in order to make it through the vows. Well, that’s unexpected. I do love classic cartoons, and Popeye in particular.

The man in the blue tee shirt is on stage now, and tells us that today he is going to present the third message in a series called Ourmarriagestinks.com. The first week he spoke on the topic of the Vow of Priority. The next week he spoke on the Vow of Pursuit. Today it’s the Vow of Partnership.

The screen now shows a couple who are obviously unhappy. The three points of the sermon are:
· Couples are always becoming more unified or more divided.
· Couples either complete each other or compete with each other.
· Couples become closer to each other as they become closer to God.

In the middle of the sermon, he shows a short clip from an Asian-American comedian (I don’t recognize him, but others might), doing a shtick on “If men had babies . . .” It’s pretty funny.

The pastor then goes into his own shtick, about how his wife talks more than he does, which gets a decent amount of laughter.

Then he tackles the topic of leadership in marriage. He quotes the famous verses from Ephesians: "Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything."

The pastor supports a very strong conservative interpretation: man is the head of the household, and has the leadership role.

But then he does the typical thing pastors do with these verses today. After firmly stating that men are the leaders of their households, he spends the next ten minutes explaining that what this actually means is that men and women are equals. Because the leader/follower template just makes people unhappy. He says that the desire for dominance is a sign of insecurity.

He reads another part of that famous passage in Ephesians: “Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.” He says that Satan’s plan for the home is that the husband dominate the wife and wife submit passively, but God’s plan is for mutual submission. He tells a joke about how in heaven there are two lines for men, one marked “Stand here if your wife dominated you,” and one marked “Stand here if your wife didn’t dominate you.” All the men are in the first line except one. St. Peter walks over to the one guy and asks why he is in that line. He replies, “My wife told me to stand here and shut up.”

The pastor tells another joke about how a man and woman agreed at the start of their marriage that he would made the major decisions and she would make the minor ones, and it worked very well because in twenty years of marriage no major decisions needed to be made.

The whole thing reminds me of the great difficulty conservative Christians have today: they have to uphold conservative viewpoints, but they aren’t really comfortable with them. So they first proclaim adamantly that men are in charge, and then explain that what that really means is mutual submission – and then make jokes about how women are really in charge.

It’s one way to adapt to current culture while claiming to hold fast to older viewpoints. And really, after the congregation has just seen and admired vivid photos of women repairing fighter jets, holding guns, and serving overseas in combat – how hard can you come down on the side of women’s subordination? Even quite conservative churches are often quite uncomfortable with this teaching – but they don’t know how to disavow it, so they preach around it, as the pastor today has done.

Another way conservative churches have adapted to modern sensibilities is by changing the terminology. The doctrine that men are the head of the household was called hierarchicalism for many years, and everyone was pretty comfortable with that. Within the last twenty or thirty years this doctrine has quietly been re-named complementarianism, which sounds better. It is explained that men and women have complementary roles in the home and the church. Men teach and women learn; men lead and women follow. Same old conservative teaching, but with a more palatable name. And after proclaiming it loudly, most of them apply it only to church roles - women can't preach or teach in church, or serve as governing elders.

Some churches that hold to this view do not allow women to vote in church meetings. The reason is that allowing them to vote is, in effect, giving married men two votes, since a wife would ask her husband how to vote and then follow his orders. This would be unfair to single men.

The sermon is about 40 minutes long, which definitely makes it one of the longer ones I sat through during my year of visiting churches. Someone plays softly on the keyboard while the pastor closes in prayer, and he then asks people to raise their hands if they need prayer, or want to be saved. The pastor leads us in the sinner’s prayer. The church may show cartoon clips and comedy sketches, but they come back to some pretty old-fashioned, tried-and-true standbys in the end.

Announcements come back up on the screen. The church is putting together a mission team to work on Hurricane Katrina relief projects.

There is an offering and one more short praise song, and the service ends. People immediately begin breaking down the stage and putting things away. Setting all this up and taking it down every week must be a big job. These must be some dedicated members.

I stand around for a few minutes, and walk around the auditorium for a while. An older man (by which I mean, even older than me) shakes my hand and asks me what I thought of the service. Very nice, I answer. He smiles and says, “It sure wasn’t boring, was it? Bet you haven’t seen a service like that before!” I smile. Yes, I’m thinking, I haven’t seen comedy clips and cartoon clips in church before, but I think I’ve seen everything else you have here – most of it I saw about thirty years ago. But I see that he is genuinely proud of his church, and just wants me to like it.

On my way out of the auditorium I shake the pastor’s hand. I can’t help but ask him one question before I leave.

“Thanks very much for the sermon. So my duty as a wife is to follow my husband’s spiritual guidance?”

“Well, yes, unless it’s something from Satan.” He laughs to let me know that this is sort of a joke.

“Thanks; he converted to Catholicism recently and wants me to convert also. You’ve been a big help!”

He smiles uncertainly, and looks uncomfortable. I realize that I’ve taken a little bit of unfair advantage; he can’t really respond in the few moments we have by the door. I’ve seen this trick before – the parishioner delivering what he or she thinks is a zinger on the way out the door. I just never imagined I’d be the parishioner doing it.

It’s kind of fun. (Which doesn’t mean it’s right.)

Epilogue

I received a nice note after my visit, from Bob Smith, Campus Pastor. Apparently Discovery Church has several locations in southern New Jersey, and calls individual congregations campuses. I am on their email and snail mail lists, and I receive lots of both paper and electronic messages over the next few months.

They were raising money to build or buy a facility, or campus. When I checked their website again in 2011, just before writing this post, I got the impression that things have cooled down a bit over the past four years. There seems to be just one location now, in Williamstown, New Jersey. Perhaps the Voorhees site didn’t work out; I’m not sure. If it faltered, it sure wasn’t for lack of energy on the part of the pastors and musicians.

I thought a little more about Discovery’s slogan, “It’s a sin for church to be boring.” I’m reminded of a John Updike short story in which a man attends mass, and is asked upon his return to the house where he and friends are spending a weekend, “How was it?”

He is surprised by the question. How was it? It’s the same as always. The same as it has been for decades. The same old thing. That’s the point.

Some people don’t seem to understand that the sameness – the boringness – of ritual can be very comforting, satisfying, meaningful, and beautiful. People who just aren’t put together in a way that makes them appreciate ritual and tradition are likely more attracted to churches that offer rock music and cartoon clips and comedy skits. Which is not to say that those things are wrong. But I do think that the folks who want church to be exciting and different every week may be missing out on something, something that has sustained this boring old institution for a couple millennia. They shouldn’t be completely positive that the traditions of the past thirty years that they have adopted will be as popular in the long run – or even in the short run, like four years or so.

Come Alive! New Testament Church, epilogue

The church was prompt about follow-up. A few days after my visit I received a phone call from a member who encouraged me to come back, and asked if I had any questions.

I told her that I had become interested in the church because of all the stories about the Jackson family and the starving boys. Did she know anything about that?

The poor woman was obviously familiar with the story, and equally obviously did not know what to say. I don’t blame her for that. It’s a tough position to be in.

Thinking over what I know from the newspaper articles, I do not believe that anyone in the church had any reason to think that the Jacksons were mistreating the four boys. If a family in my church had four weirdly small, obviously ill sons and told me that their condition was due to something genetic, or congenital, or to early mistreatment, I would believe them. I might question why they didn’t take the boys to a dentist, but that would be about the extent of my doubt. I would probably just think that it is wonderful that such sick boys had found a family to care for them.

After the story broke, it is perhaps more surprising that the church defended Raymond and Vanessa Jackson so vigorously. As the facts began to emerge, you would think that church members would begin to have doubts. You would think that, unless you had some experience with cognitive dissonance.

It would be a good thing if every educated churchgoer took some time to think a little about cognitive dissonance. The introduction to the article on this topic in Wikipedia begins:

“Cognitive dissonance is an uncomfortable feeling caused by holding conflicting ideas simultaneously. The theory of cognitive dissonance proposes that people have a motivational drive to reduce dissonance. They do this by changing their attitudes, beliefs, and actions. Dissonance is also reduced by justifying, blaming, and denying. It is one of the most influential and extensively studied theories in social psychology.”

According to the theory of cognitive dissonance, when people discover facts that are in contradiction to their beliefs, they can reduce the dissonance by changing those beliefs – or by “justifying, blaming, and denying.” The latter course of action is extremely popular.

In the case of Come Alive! church, the prevailing beliefs were that the Jacksons were saintly people exhibiting Christlike compassion in caring for these extremely ill boys, that the church was demonstrating its own goodness and Christlikeness in supporting the Jacksons (on top of everything else, you have the interesting dynamic that the Jacksons were a black family attending a basically white church, which provided a subtext of additional godliness), and that the pastors and people were good at discerning “real faith” and “true saints.”

Those are powerful and attractive beliefs, and the facts were no match for them.

If Pastor Thomas were a hypocrite, he would not have stood up before the House Ways and Means Committee to defend the Jacksons – there was nothing in it for him but ridicule. I believe he honestly thought, “I am a good person and a good judge of character. I could not be so wrong about these people. Therefore the facts as presented must be wrong.”

Religious people think this way all the time. (As do non-religious people; it’s a human thing.)

Now, what would account for the Raymond and Vanessa Jackson’s behavior? I have more trouble thinking about this, but it may be something like that Munchhausen by proxy syndrome that describes people who make their own children ill. I’ll admit it’s a very unusual case of whatever it is – both parents colluding, as well as discriminating so blatantly between the boys and the girls in their family. However, I’m pretty sure that in some way their actions were justified in their own minds, hard as that is to comprehend. They were obviously rather far removed from reality in more ways than one. For example, when the case broke it was discovered that the Jacksons were more than $9,000 behind on rent payments that were already heavily subsidized by the state, and electricity in the home had been turned off for months. Raymond Jackson’s job? He was a financial planner.
As time went by, especially as it became clearer every month that all the boys needed was an ordinary family and enough food, I imagine (and hope) church members began to come around to accepting the very unpleasant fact that they had been ignoring starving children in their midst for years. No one would like to admit to a thing like that, but there it is. Lots of people don’t want to admit lots of things about their churches – or their families, or themselves, or anything else in which they have some personal emotional investment, such as their country or their profession.

In the end, I’m glad, as I said, that the church did not abandon Vanessa Jackson. It would be best if they were to confront her and themselves about glaringly obvious sins and failings, of course, but even if she is never able to finally take proper responsibility for these terrible crimes, it’s better that she has some support somewhere. She is a person made in the image of God, too.

Churches are funny. Church people want to see themselves as the good guys, the ones who defend the orphans and fight for the powerless. And it’s so very hard to accept that more often than we would like to believe we are the bad guys, the ones who starve orphans, or get rich off the poor, or rape children, or feed the flames of hatred. The case of four starving boys in the midst of a loving church family should be a wake-up call not just to New Jersey child welfare services, or to Pastor Thomas, or his church, or the Jackson family, but to churchgoers everywhere. We are very, very good at justifying, blaming, and denying.

You might say it’s a special gift.

Come Alive! New Testament Church, part 2

I find the church easily; it is about 25 minutes from my home. It is a fairly new building set back less than a quarter of a mile from a main highway, among fields and woods. I found out later, from a brochure the assistant pastor gave me, that the church had purchased what was the former home of the Medford Farms Liquor and Deli, along with twenty acres of land that include farmland, a creek, and a pond. The cream-colored building looks slightly barnlike, although you don’t see many barns with a slim white steeple. I have arrived on a gorgeous autumn morning; signs in front of a cornfield to the side of the parking lot announce an upcoming free fall festival.

The road into the church parking lot also leads to a fairly large house set back a bit, and I drive there first. This building, it turns out, is the headquarters for Creation Festivals and Creation Concerts. There is also a picnic area sheltered by one of those big white tentlike structures you can rent for parties, and a very large children’s play area filled with multicolored apparatus. I head back to the church parking lot.

I see people leaving and entering the church, and I was right in thinking that it would have been okay to wear jeans to this church. But not everyone is dressed casually; there are also men in suits and women in dresses. When I enter the small lobby, a few minutes before the starting time of 10:30 AM,  someone hands me a bulletin and greets me. Inside the sanctuary, I find a seat about halfway to the front. A few people are milling around, visiting and talking. The seats are wooden padded chairs attached to each other, quite comfortable, arranged in a semicircle around the front platform.

The sanctuary could probably seat about 250. The wall behind the main platform has a decorative screen of wooden slats, in the center of which is a large circle with a cross and two doves. There is a traditional communion table in front of this, holding a golden cross and two candles, and the pulpit is front and center. There are flower arrangements. The American flag and the Christian flag are on stands off to the right, and the equipment for the praise band is to the left. Television screens hang from the ceiling throughout, and during the pre-service time they display a picture of two lit candles.

A couple sitting a few rows behind me catch my eye and wish me a hearty good morning. Soon after that, a young woman stops by and says hello and hands me a piece of folded paper. This is to let us know that Pastor Appreciation Day is coming up, and there will be a cake and coffee reception honoring the four pastors of this church after the second service. People are invited to donate cards, money, poems, and prayers to be placed in baskets to give to each pastor.

One of the pastors introduces himself, but I didn't catch the name. He says he’s glad I’m visiting, and then leaves momentarily, coming back carrying a large coffee mug filled with candy, herbal tea, and a packet of hot cocoa mix, gift-wrapped in cellophane and ribbon. The church’s slogan (A Place for You) and its URL are imprinted on the front of the mug. He also gives me a little brochure about the church, and asks me to fill out the visitor’s card inside and drop it into the offering basket.

The couple who had greeted me earlier come over and introduce themselves. It turns out that this is only their second Sunday at the church! They came last week and liked it so much that they came back again for the evening service, and now they are back for the second week, already urging newcomers to attend. They are quite friendly and happy. That’s rather impressive, for the church to have made such a big impression on these people so quickly.

I look through the bulletin. Inserts advertise a children’s program called The Bigsby Show, a women’s retreat, and the Fall Festival. The first entry in the announcements section asks everyone to keep the leadership and congregation of Lord of Life Lutheran Church in their prayers. It’s not clear to me if this is an indication that the Lutheran church is having some kind of problem, or if it is just Come Alive’s custom to ask God to bless other congregations.

There are very detailed prayer requests in the bulletin, in most cases naming people by both first and last name, and asking for specific things. Hey – I found a mention of the Jacksons! I read a request that we pray “for strength and peace for Vanessa Jackson and her family, and for favor with the authorities leading to an early release.” I’m glad to see that the church is still concerned about her – more thoughts on that topic in the epilogue.

The praise band picks up their instruments. There are nine members in all – four guitarists, two keyboard players, one drummer, and two singers. A pastor welcomes everyone, and the band begins.

There are about 120 people in the sanctuary, and almost everyone stands throughout the music. This would be okay, except that the music goes on for the next 45 minutes. I can walk all day, but I hate standing for more than 20 minutes. A few of the older folks remain seated, and I feel like joining them, but I don’t want to throw my lot in with the geriatric crowd just yet. Still – 45 minutes of standing! Even the Greek Orthodox folks didn’t ask me to do that.

Lyrics are shown on the television screens. The singing seems a bit tepid to me, but it’s hard to tell, because the band is so loud that perhaps I just can’t hear anyone else singing; I can barely hear myself.

After the first half hour I am confirmed in my belief that praise music is awfully dated. I remember standing and singing these same songs in the seventies. We end the music session with that very nice arrangement of “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross” and “O the Wonderful Cross” that is deservedly popular. Charles Wesley’s gorgeous 18th-century lyrics still win the day.

Next there is a break for saying hello and welcoming each other (although an awful lot of that seemed to go on before the singing, too). The pastor who gave me the mug stops by again, and asks how I learned about the church. I am hesitant to mention the Jacksons, which might be a touchy subject, so I tell him I found the church in the yellow pages. That is half true. He tells me I should come back for the evening service, which features more music than the morning service, and more intense music. He says this as though it is a good thing.

People are moving around now, chatting. This break seems to last for an awfully long time, although it is probably only about ten minutes. I can see that this is a close-knit group, with lots to say to each other.

The pastor calls us back to our seats for the offering. We read aloud together a statement about how we are giving because “God’s work is great and extensive and deserves my full-hearted support. I give expecting God to do might things in the midst of His people.” Then we read aloud two Old Testament texts, Exodus 35:21 and Nehemiah 4:19.

This last passage reminds me of our fledgling Jesus people church in Carbondale, Illinois. The founders of the group, trying to settle on a name, decided to choose by opening the Bible at random (“letting God choose for us”). The page they opened to contained Exodus 35:21; the heading of the page was “The people’s offering.” So that became our name, the one we used when we incorporated as a 501c3 organization.

Unfortunately, we were unaware not only of the embarrassing history of what happens when people try to get guidance by opening the Bible at random, but also shockingly ignorant of modern history – no one in the group noticed the similarity between a name like The People’s Offering and a name like The People’s Republic of China. (Readers of David Lodge’s comic novel Changing Places may recall that students at his fictional California university were engaged in a struggle to set up the People’s Garden and the People’s Fishpond, among other efforts to establish a Marxist utopia.) Naming our church The People’s Offering sounded might suspicious to plenty of outsiders; little did they know that the name was indicative only of our cheerful ignorance.

Ah, memories. At Come Alive! the offering is taken using purple velvet bags on sticks. After the offering, the pastor asks a couple to come up and speak. They are adopting an 11-year-old girl from China, who was in the US recently for medical treatment. She had been here for medical treatment earlier, when she was five years old, and this was a follow-up visit. The couple are part of a team that helps children come to the US for care, and they feel strongly that God wants them to adopt this girl. They show a video slideshow of the girl’s visit, and she is adorable! One of the pastors (I can’t tell who is who among the four pastors of this church) asks us to give to another offering to help defray the $20,000 adoption costs. He notes that he and his wife adopted a Korean girl many years ago, and they now couldn’t imagine their family without her. So the velvet offering bags come around again, and I am glad to contribute to this cause.

Then a young woman wearing jeans and a jean jacket sings a solo, with prerecorded instrumental accompaniment. By now it is 11:35, and we are just getting to the sermon!

One of the pastors (I think he is the one who gave me the mug, but I’m not positive) asks us to open our Bibles to the first chapter of Colossians. This is a church where everyone brings a Bible; there are none in the pews. He is preaching on “the hope that God has for the saints.” This is going to be a sermon on heaven, which is actually a fairly unusual topic for a sermon these days.

First, he points out how important it is that the Colossians showed love for all the saints, even though some of them were probably not very lovable. He asks us if we realize that there are saints in all denominations, and if we know that we are expected to love them all. He says that lack of love among Christians has probably done the most harm to the body of Christ throughout history, which I think may be true. (Anti-Semitism is in the running for the title of Most Harm, though – again, my opinion.)

This man has a clear, conversational style of speaking, and explicates the passage at length. He says that thinking about heaven is more practical than most people assume, because it affects our actions on earth. He mentions that common fear that people have that heaven sounds boring, and suggests that, whatever it is like, it will be filled with purpose, and will not be boring. The sermon is about twenty minutes long, so we end at 12:15 with a simple benediction.

I stand around for a while, and then head to the lobby again. I stop in the bathroom on the way out, and a young woman notices my visitor’s mug and tells me how much she loves the church – she has been attending for twenty years. So the place has been recommended enthusiastically by both old and new members, which is rather impressive. I can say right now that in my year of visiting churches, this is the only time this happened - spontaneous, unprompted recommendations of the church by current members.

I peek into the sanctuary again. It looks as though no one has left. They are still standing around visiting, and no doubt most of them will be back again tonight. This appears to be a rather small but tight-knit group of people who really, really like their church. And they are involved in medical ministry, prison ministry, nursing home ministry, which is a big plus for me. It’s not the style of service I prefer, but there seems to be something here that other people love.

So what’s with this church and the starving boys?

Come Alive! New Testament Church

Come Alive! New Testament Church

Medford, New Jersey
October 14, 2007

I chose this church for one reason: it had been in the news a few years ago, and I was very curious about the pastor and the congregation.

The story that had made national headlines in 2004 was horrifying. (A compilation of stories on this case that ran in The New York Times can be found here.) A homeowner in Collingswood, New Jersey investigated noises in his yard at 3 am, and found someone foraging for food in his garbage can. Not an animal – it was a small boy. The man brought the boy inside his house and called the police, who took the boy to the police station and gave him a stuffed animal for comfort. The boy said that his name was Bruce, but he didn’t know his last name or where he lived.

At 8 a.m. Raymond Jackson called the police station to report that his son was missing. Police were shocked to discover that Bruce was a 19-year-old man. By noon authorities had removed six other children – three boys and three girls, all adopted except for one girl who was a foster child, from the house the Jacksons were renting next to the neighbor whose garbage can had been disturbed in the middle of the night. The girls were healthy; but all four boys – Bruce and his three younger brothers – were horrifically emaciated and undersized. Bruce, age 19, weighed 45 pounds and stood 48 inches tall. Keith, age 14, was the same height as Bruce, but weighed only 40 pounds. Tyrone, age 10, was 28 pounds and 38 inches tall. Michael, age 9, weighed 22 pounds and was 37 inches tall. All the boys had blackened, rotting teeth.

Details began to emerge. Some neighbors said they had never seen the boys, and didn’t realize there were young boys in the house. One neighbor reported that he had seen the two older boys out in the yard, clipping the grass with hand shears “for days.” He assumed that they were about ten years old. The boys had the job of taking the trash cans to the street, and the neighbor noticed that they had to stop several times to catch their breath every time they performed this chore. He assumed that social workers were monitoring the situation. Like everyone else, he also assumed the boys were much, much younger than they actually were.

The children were home-schooled, but New Jersey does not require proof that home-schooled children are receiving an education, and in fact there was no evidence of any education. The boys had never seen a doctor or dentist during the years they lived with the Jacksons. There were locks on the kitchen doors to keep them away from food. The boys claimed that their diet consisted mostly of pancake batter, uncooked cereal, and raw potatoes. Sometimes they went so long without food that when they were given something to eat, they were unable to keep it down. They gnawed on wallboard and windowsills to quench their hunger. They said that they had been beaten with brooms and belts, and were not allowed to bathe.

Of course, the New Jersey Department of Human Services and the Division of Youth and Family Services, which had been supposedly monitoring the boys’ welfare, came under withering scrutiny for their handling of this case.

In their defense, the Jacksons claimed that all four boys suffered from fetal alcohol syndrome and eating disorders, including a disorder that makes a person regurgitate food into his mouth and chew it. Because of these problems, they had to lock up all food in the house and keep it from the boys.

Doctors conducted tests and found no evidence of any such ailments. In fact, as soon as the boys were removed from the Jacksons’ home and placed into other foster homes, they made remarkable recoveries, with nothing more than normal diet and vitamins. The cause of the boys’ shocking condition was found to be intentional starvation.

The next development in the case, though, was a big surprise to local churchgoers. The Jacksons were members of a church, the whole family attended services regularly, and the church rallied around them after the story broke. The pastor of Come Alive! New Testament Church, Rev. Harry Thomas, helped raise the $20,000 cash needed to make bail for Vanessa and Raymond Jackson, and the parents received a standing ovation from the congregation when they returned to church on Sunday after being freed from jail. The church donated more than $10,000 to pay the family’s overdue electricity bill and back rent. Come Alive! started a website, savethejacksons.org, with testimonials about the “saintly” Jacksons and how well they had cared for the four boys. In fact, the family fed the homeless on Camden streets and near the Ben Franklin Bridge in Philadelphia. They sat in the front row at church, and the boys sang gospel songs on stage.

The Jackson case was so extreme that it was brought before the Human Resources Subcommittee of the House Ways and Means Committee, so that committee members could examine whether there are enough checks to ensure the safety of children who receive federal money while in the care of child welfare agencies. (The Jacksons received about $28,000 annually from the state to cover the costs of raising the children.) At that hearing, Pastor Thomas accused Bruce Jackson, the boy found rummaging in the garbage, of lying about conditions in the house. He questioned the weight gains the boys had made after being removed from the house, asking “Did they have shoes on when they were weighed?” (Bruce gained 18 pounds in the month after he was taken from the Jackson home; Pastor Thomas must know of some rather enormous shoes.)

Members of the subcommittee publicly scolded Pastor Thomas for his comments.

Pastor Thomas did not back down. He later testified at the trial in which Vanessa Jackson was sentenced to seven years in prison for starving the boys (her husband died before the case came to trial), “I’ve known these people as very loving people, people who have a heart for children and they have a heart for God.”

Whaaaaaaat???