 |  How to recognize and ride the winds of the spirit
Fall 2001
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The School of Joy
Ben Patterson
October 1, 2001
I preached at Bethel Gospel Tabernacle in Jamaica-Queens, New York, one Sunday in 1992. The song service was very black, very Pentecostal, very joyful, worshiping not only with hearts and voices but with bodies and faces. As I stood up front with my friend, Pastor Roderick Caesar, I was doing my white best to move with them.
They were all smiling at me in a big way and I was feeling cool, free, and soulful. Roderick leaned over and said, "You know why they're smiling, don't you?" No, I didn't. He chuckled and said, "It's because you don't know how to dance." I laughed, but my face turned red. Then I looked at their smiles again. It was OK with them that I couldn't dance and they could. They were smiling at me, not laughing. Maybe we could work out an agreement: I'd teach them something from the Word of God, they'd teach me something of the joy of God.
I was raised to prefer a mild Aristotelian joy, as in the philosopher Aristotle who defined good as the mean between two extremes. I didn't want the kind of thing I saw at the local Pentecostal church in my hometown-too raw and boisterous. Nor did I want what I saw in my liturgical friends-too buttoned-down and cerebral. If the "liturgicals" were an aged cabernet, the Pentecostals were tequila. I was a Calvinistic Baptist, and I wanted grape juice. I wanted good doctrinal preaching, minimal body involvement, a rousing hymn, and damp eyes once in a while, not wet. I wanted joy in regular doses I could count on, and above all, control.
I remember a key moment when I was pastoring my first church. One Sunday the music director asked me if, when I called the congregation to worship with Psalm 134:1-3, I would actually invite the congregation to do what the psalm says. "Lift up your ...
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