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Authors: Dennis Covington
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I’d seen the McGlocklins at services at The Church of Jesus with Signs Following in Scottsboro. We became friends, and then something more than friends, but that is a long and complicated
story that began, I think, on the afternoon of my first brush-arbor meeting on top of Sand Mountain, when Aline was taken out in the spirit, and I accompanied her on tambourine.
I had never even heard of a brush arbor until J.L. Dyal built one in a field behind his house near the Sand Mountain town of Section in the summer of 1992. Brother Carl had invited me to the services, and J.L. had drawn a map. “You take a left at the Sand Mountain Dragway sign,” he said. “We’ll get started just before sundown.”
I was pleased the handlers had felt comfortable enough to include me. It meant the work was going well. The relationship between journalist and subject is often an unspoken conspiracy. The handlers wanted to show me something, and I was ready to be shown. It seemed to me that the conviction of Glenn Summerford was not the end of their story, but simply the beginning of another chapter. I was interested in what would happen to them now that Glenn was in prison and The Church of Jesus with Signs Following had split. But I had a personal agenda too. I was enjoying the passion and abandon of their worship. Vicki didn’t seem to mind. She encouraged me to go. So I told Brother Carl and J.L. I’d be there for the brush-arbor services, although I couldn’t visualize what they were talking about. “Brush arbor” seemed a contradictory term. The word arbor suggested civilized restraint. The word brush didn’t.
I did know that outdoor revivals had once been commonplace in the rural South. The most famous occurred in 1801, when thousands of renegade Presbyterians, in their rebellion against stiff-necked Calvinism, gathered in a field near Cane Ridge, Kentucky, for a week-long camp meeting. They were soon joined by Methodists and Baptists, until their combined ranks swelled to more than twenty-five thousand, a crowd many times greater than the population of the largest town in Kentucky at the time. Something inexplicable and portentous happened to many of the worshipers in that field near Cane Ridge. Overcome by the Holy Spirit, they began to shriek, bark, and jerk. Some fell to the ground as though struck dead. “Though so awful to behold,” wrote one witness, “I do not remember that any one of the thousands ... ever sustained an injury in body.”
Cane Ridge set the stage for the dramatic events at a mission on Azusa Street in Los Angeles in 1906, when the Holy Ghost descended in power on a multiracial congregation led by a one-eyed black preacher named William Seymour, and the great American spiritual phenomenon of the twentieth century, Pentecostalism, began in a fury of tongue speaking and prophesying and healing.
Cane Ridge had been the prototype of revivalism on a grand scale. The crowd at J.L.’s brush arbor was somewhat smaller — thirteen of us altogether, plus a gaggle of curious
onlookers who hid behind Brother Carl Porter’s Dodge Dakota pickup. But the facilities at J.L.’s were top-notch. Traditional brush arbors had been small and temporary, primitive shelters usually built at harvest time from whatever materials might be at hand. Willow branches were especially prized because of their flexibility. Thick vines added strength. The idea was to give field hands a place to worship so they wouldn’t have to leave the premises before all the crops were in. But J.L. had constructed his brush arbor out of sturdy twoby-fours over which he had stretched sheets of clear plastic so that services could be held even in a downpour. The vines and brush piled on top of the plastic appeared to be decorative rather than functional, yielding the impression of a brush arbor without all its inconveniences. J.L.’s father-in-law, Dozier Edmonds, had helped string electricity to the structure and had installed a length of
story that began, I think, on the afternoon of my first brush-arbor meeting on top of Sand Mountain, when Aline was taken out in the spirit, and I accompanied her on tambourine.
I had never even heard of a brush arbor until J.L. Dyal built one in a field behind his house near the Sand Mountain town of Section in the summer of 1992. Brother Carl had invited me to the services, and J.L. had drawn a map. “You take a left at the Sand Mountain Dragway sign,” he said. “We’ll get started just before sundown.”
I was pleased the handlers had felt comfortable enough to include me. It meant the work was going well. The relationship between journalist and subject is often an unspoken conspiracy. The handlers wanted to show me something, and I was ready to be shown. It seemed to me that the conviction of Glenn Summerford was not the end of their story, but simply the beginning of another chapter. I was interested in what would happen to them now that Glenn was in prison and The Church of Jesus with Signs Following had split. But I had a personal agenda too. I was enjoying the passion and abandon of their worship. Vicki didn’t seem to mind. She encouraged me to go. So I told Brother Carl and J.L. I’d be there for the brush-arbor services, although I couldn’t visualize what they were talking about. “Brush arbor” seemed a contradictory term. The word arbor suggested civilized restraint. The word brush didn’t.
I did know that outdoor revivals had once been commonplace in the rural South. The most famous occurred in 1801, when thousands of renegade Presbyterians, in their rebellion against stiff-necked Calvinism, gathered in a field near Cane Ridge, Kentucky, for a week-long camp meeting. They were soon joined by Methodists and Baptists, until their combined ranks swelled to more than twenty-five thousand, a crowd many times greater than the population of the largest town in Kentucky at the time. Something inexplicable and portentous happened to many of the worshipers in that field near Cane Ridge. Overcome by the Holy Spirit, they began to shriek, bark, and jerk. Some fell to the ground as though struck dead. “Though so awful to behold,” wrote one witness, “I do not remember that any one of the thousands ... ever sustained an injury in body.”
Cane Ridge set the stage for the dramatic events at a mission on Azusa Street in Los Angeles in 1906, when the Holy Ghost descended in power on a multiracial congregation led by a one-eyed black preacher named William Seymour, and the great American spiritual phenomenon of the twentieth century, Pentecostalism, began in a fury of tongue speaking and prophesying and healing.
Cane Ridge had been the prototype of revivalism on a grand scale. The crowd at J.L.’s brush arbor was somewhat smaller — thirteen of us altogether, plus a gaggle of curious
onlookers who hid behind Brother Carl Porter’s Dodge Dakota pickup. But the facilities at J.L.’s were top-notch. Traditional brush arbors had been small and temporary, primitive shelters usually built at harvest time from whatever materials might be at hand. Willow branches were especially prized because of their flexibility. Thick vines added strength. The idea was to give field hands a place to worship so they wouldn’t have to leave the premises before all the crops were in. But J.L. had constructed his brush arbor out of sturdy twoby-fours over which he had stretched sheets of clear plastic so that services could be held even in a downpour. The vines and brush piled on top of the plastic appeared to be decorative rather than functional, yielding the impression of a brush arbor without all its inconveniences. J.L.’s father-in-law, Dozier Edmonds, had helped string electricity to the structure and had installed a length of
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