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In the spring of 1906, a traveling preacher named William Joseph Seymour stepped off a train in Los Angeles. He'd heard there was a storefront church in the migrant-rich city preaching a message much like his own: that no one had really received baptism in the Holy Spirit unless the Lord had reached down and impelled him to speak in a private, God-given language, just as described in the Bible passage about the first Pentecost.

Seymour was the son of former slaves, self-educated, blind in one eye, and willing to persevere when the church he'd heard about gave him a tepid reception. For a while, he delivered his sermons in the homes of black domestics and janitors. Before long, one of Seymour's new followers began babbling spontaneously and ecstatically. Others soon began speaking in tongues, too, and within days Seymour himself had been blessed with the gift.

Other signs and wonders followed, and the word spread. For most of the blacks, Mexicans, and uneducated whites then flocking to the West Coast to seek their fortunes, California hadn't turned out to be the land of milk and honey. Seymour's message—that the Rapture and the bounty of heaven were near—was something to cling to. Conducting meetings out of a private home, Seymour quickly acquired a multiracial following (practically unheard of in the viciously segregated LA of the day) and, before long, a meeting space in a wood-frame two-story building at 312 Azusa Street that had once housed a church but most recently served as a stable.

Azusa Street "smelled of horses and had neither pews nor a pulpit," wrote theologian Harvey Cox. "But Seymour and his friends...placed timbers on upended nail kegs for benches, and piled up shoeboxes for a pulpit." The crowds that streamed there grew so big that services were eventually held around the clock to accommodate them all. Café society was scandalized by the spectacle of healings and trances, but the downtrodden congregation was electrified by the idea that God could be experienced directly, without fancy trappings, and kept the revival going night and day for three years.

A century later, Pastor Mac Hammond stands on a broad, low stage at the front of the auditorium-sized sanctuary of his church in Brooklyn Park. Part of the Word-Faith movement, an offshoot of Pentecostalism, Living Word Christian Center is a lineal descendant of Seymour's revival, but it's a world apart from the inner-city squalor of Azusa Street. Living Word's main facility—which houses not just Hammond's church but his parochial high school, bookstore, coffee shop, and other amenities—is located in an industrial park a short jaunt off of Interstate 694, past a middle-market hotel and several anonymous warehouses. There's a small taupe sign and some very modest landscaping, but little else to distinguish the church from the Wilsons Leather facility next door.

Hammond is tall, broad-shouldered, and perpetually tan. He is blessed with a brilliant white smile and a warm Southern drawl. Partway through the service, his face momentarily grows weary and his voice drops. He's been talking about the importance of the tithe, the practice of giving 10 percent of one's gross income to the church. He speaks wistfully of letters from anguished parishioners who say they're too broke to contribute that much. He wishes they understood that the proper response to that fear is to redouble one's resolve.

"God says the only way to get out from under financial pressure is to give, to tithe," he explains. "You may feel like you do not have enough to support your family, but it's just the opposite. Adversity, trials, tests, the crown of life—you must keep tithing through these tests of faith.

"Some people stop when it appears tithing hasn't paid off," he clucks. "But if you keep believing unto death, the crown will be yours. Financial adversity is a test of Satan to abandon the practice of giving and tithing. Do it anyway and you will get the crown."

Ushers hand around white baskets, collecting envelopes that look like ATM deposits: This much for the tithe, this much for the capital campaign or parochial school scholarship fund, and so on. Many don't put anything in the basket because they have already arranged to have their credit cards charged or their checking accounts automatically debited on a regular basis. Still others see Hammond on KARE 11 or the religious broadcasting network that airs his Winner's Way nationwide and call up to give over the phone.

If outer accoutrements like clothing and cars are any indication, Living Word's congregation appears to be doing pretty well financially. The majority is white, but not as white as Minnesota on the whole. Possibly a third of the families in attendance are African American, interracial, Asian American, or Latino. A few are dressed in jeans and sweatshirts, but most look like they just left their desks at corporate offices with their heels and suits. A number of women wear tall African headdresses.

All told, Pastor Mac's flock offered up some $24,047,130 in "contributions" in 2005, according to Living Word's annual report, or about $460,000 a week. On top of that, there is the revenue raised by Hammond's related ventures, which include Maranatha Christian Academy, a two-campus parochial school located in north Minneapolis (elementary) and Brooklyn Park (high school); a teetotaling downtown Minneapolis nightclub, Club Three Degrees; a bookstore; a coffee shop; a Christian internet service provider; and numerous other ventures. These businesses brought in over $8.5 million in revenue in 2005.

The cash underwrites a sprawling suburban compound complete with a cavernous sanctuary where you can watch a larger-than-life Pastor Mac on big-screen TVs and listen to him via a state-of-the-art sound system. Cameras record services for broadcast and for sale on DVDs in the lobby.

Living Word is the church where Michele Bachmann earlier this fall told parishioners that Christ had compelled her to run for Congress, and Hammond is the minister who made headlines when he told his flock that he'd vote for her. Hammond is just as conservative as the story suggests, but politics—even the "values" politics of the religious right—isn't really what he and Living Word are all about.

Rather, the message that packs them in is the gospel of prosperity, the perfect marriage of almighty God and the almighty dollar. Also known as the health and wealth movement, the name-it-and-claim-it doctrine, or "Positive Confession," the creed has historically appealed mostly to poor people and minorities in rural backwaters and inner-city slums. But thanks to the efforts of a new generation of "pastorpreneurs" like Hammond, who preach in upscale suburban megachurches, the message has found a new, more prosperous audience.

This time around, the good word has been translated into the comfortable, familiar language of self-help and business-inspiration literature. And it's delivered without the things people find off-putting about church: the pews, the dress codes, the interminable sermons, and above all that gloom and doom about sin. God, it seems, wants these folks to go ahead and enjoy their riches in the here and now.

 

Wednesday nights are Believers' Nights at Living Word, when the faithful hope to achieve a state of euphoria known as "moving in the holy ghost." Accordingly, the weekly service starts with 45 minutes of live music. Or more specifically, of a single catchy, rhythmic, one-refrain song repeated until most people are out of their seats swaying and bobbing in time. The words scroll across the giant TV screens at the front of the sanctuary so that instead of holding hymnals, people have their arms free to wave.

 

Finally, Lynne Hammond, Mac's wife, takes the stage. She steps to a clear plastic podium, lifts a wireless microphone and begins speaking in tongues. The sounds coming out of her mouth have the cadence of words and sentences. There are pauses, as if someone were answering back, strings of sounds that rise like questions, and flirtatious coos. It's babble, but it sounds completely natural.

Even without actual words issuing from her mouth, Pastor Lynne is engaging. She has a pleasant voice and a girlish giggle. She's wearing strappy sandals, a fashionable skirt that comes to mid-calf, and a matching top. Her makeup is probably too heavy if you're standing next to her, but from the back of the sanctuary or via the omnipresent TV screens, the dark eyeliner and mascara just animate her face.

Some members of the congregation join her and, picked up by microphones scattered around the room and reflected back at the crowd on a similar number of speakers, the sound rises to a steady blur. "There are six people here who are depressed," Pastor Lynne says, finally uttering the first comprehensible words of the evening. "One of you is even contemplating suicide."

She wants those people to get up and run a lap around the auditorium, past the stage. "If you do that, your depression will be lifted from you," she promises. It takes a minute or two, during which she repeats herself, but on the north side of the room a woman gets up and starts to run. She's crying noisily, gasping for breath. Several others quickly join her.

"All right," Pastor Lynne coaxes, her voice sweet, "there's one more, in the balcony." Heads swivel as a man rises from his seat.

Next Pastor Lynne asks if the person present with the metal plate in their skull would step forward. A teenage girl approaches the stage. Lynne puts a hand on her forehead and shouts, "No, no more, no more surgeries. Be healed." She broadens the call to anyone with metal in their bodies. "No," she commands each, "no more."

Some remain standing, but when she takes her hands off others, they crumple to the floor. A small squad of male ushers in blue blazers trails her, catching anyone who collapses. Some get up within a minute or two; when they don't, women ushers come around with blankets to cover them up.

Music has risen in the background, and Pastor Lynne moves around the room touching people's foreheads and shoulders. In addition to her healing commands, she plies the crowd with funny, charming asides. "I won't forget you, honey," she says to a teenage boy who comes running up as she turns to go back up on the stage. "You..." she shakes a finger at him and giggles coquettishly. "You."

Back on stage she recounts a dream. It's long and involved and populated with characters who sound more Harry Potter than Bible. There are seraphim and cherubim and angels and archangels, each wearing a costume she describes in detail. As the celestial beings arrive on Earth, graves open up and their occupants are lifted to heaven as the Earth is covered in black water.

At this, Pastor Lynne brightens again. She knows she's not supposed to speculate about the Rapture, she confesses, but she can't help but think the dream was sent to her as a signal it's coming much sooner than she imagined. "The rabbis say it will happen on one of the 7s," she explains. Previously, she had barely dared hope that meant 2021, but this dream was so vivid that now she thinks it might be 2014 or even 2007.

The crowd gasps, and Pastor Lynne changes the subject. "It's time to talk about obedience," she says, "and that means the offering." As ushers circulate, she wades back into the crowd, laying on hands. People throughout the auditorium join hands, and as the people she touches collapse, whole rows of worshippers are pulled to the ground, laughing hysterically.

The band starts up again: "Drunk, drunk, drunk, drunk on the new wine." The lyrics refer to the biblical story about the first Pentecost, when passers-by mistook worshippers' supernaturally charged euphoria for drunkenness. But it actually sounds like a drinking song, and repeats itself for 20 minutes or so, the congregation becoming progressively giddier. Two and a half hours after the service started, her buoyant flock finally disperses.

 

In a video on Living Word's website titled, "Pastor Mac's Airplane Testimony," Hammond describes his lifelong love of flying. Dressed not in one of his immaculate suits but in jeans, a plaid shirt, and a bomber jacket, he talks to the camera while leaning on the wing of a sleek, bullet-shaped plane.

As a young man, flying was everything to Hammond. He was a fighter pilot in the Vietnam War, and later owned an aviation company. "Flying was my god and I needed to come down," he says, stroking the plane's red-and-white wing. "When I gave up flying for the ministry, I thought I would never fly again."

About 10 years later, though, "the day came when he gave flying back to me." Hammond had become a friend of the prosperity gospel's most successful televangelist, Kenneth Copeland, who was also an avid pilot. Hammond's grounded status saddened Copeland, and when Copeland's Fort Worth ministry upgraded its fleet, he offered to give Hammond a small plane in exchange "for $1 a month until the Lord returns."

"Kenneth became the instrument that God used to give flying back to me," Hammond gushes. Living Word later used the equity in that plane to buy a better one, and then a better one after that, so that they could travel to preach at churches throughout the country.

Hammond felt blessed, but he missed the daredevil style of the flying of his Air Force days and began to dream of having a plane he could use for aerobatic flying, specifically the Extra 300L. He was earning upward of $50,000 a year in honoraria for the guest appearances made possible by Copeland's gift, he says, and so he began saving. Within a few years he had realized his dream and purchased the $250,000 beauty that serves as video backdrop for what quickly turns into a parable about giving to God.

Recently the plane's been popping up in his prayers, Hammond continues. He meditated long and hard about it, eventually concluding that God meant for him to donate the plane to Living Word's "Breakthrough to Destiny" capital stewardship campaign, an effort to raise $30 million over and above the church's budget for a substantial addition to the building. "We must give not just from our income stream," he explains, "but from our asset base."

As he climbs into the cockpit, Hammond rhapsodizes that although it's out of his hands, he hopes the Lord prospers him again with a chance to fly a stunt plane. And he hopes Living Word members will be moved to find a way to give from their own asset bases.

The tale speaks volumes about James "Mac" Hammond Jr.'s rise. Hammond was unable to answer questions for this story by press time, but according to the boilerplate bio in Living Word's publications, he earned a BA in English from Virginia Military Institute in 1965. After graduation, he enlisted in the Air Force and trained as a pilot, ultimately flying 198 combat missions in Southeast Asia during two tours of duty.

Back in the United States, Hammond went into aviation, becoming the owner "of a successful air cargo business serving the Midwestern United States." In 1980, a business merger brought the Hammonds to Minneapolis, where they started Living Word in a hotel meeting room in Plymouth. Within a year, membership had grown from 12 to 150 and Living Word began holding services at North Hennepin Community College. Two years later, the swelling congregation moved again, to a rented warehouse in Brooklyn Park. In 1998, the church moved into its current facility, a former mattress factory purchased for $3.5 million and renovated with $12 million from a previous stewardship drive.

But according to a 1995 Twin Cities Reader investigation, the official version omits a few details. Hammond did own a company called Meridian Air Cargo, but the business went bankrupt in 1978, plunging the Hammonds into poverty. Even a decade later, while dealing with the IRS concerning unpaid interest on his taxes, Hammond described his finances as meager, the story reported.

"I entered the ministry in 1981, my wife and I starting a small church," Hammond wrote in a statement to the court. "We had no personal assets of any significance, and still have none: We do not own a home, we do not have any investments/retirement/savings accounts, we have two vehicles (with substantial balances owing) and an average accumulation of household effects."

The Lord helped the Hammonds bounce back pretty quickly. According to Living Word's annual report, last year it spent $14 million on salaries for 263 full-time and 118 part-time staffers. Among them are the Hammonds and their sons, John Hammond, who is in charge of the church's multimedia programs, and Jim Hammond, who heads the family ministries. Both Hammond daughters-in-law are fixtures in Living Word's various publications and missionary activities. Unlike other nonprofits, the church does not have to disclose what it pays its top earners.

All told, in 2005 Living Word was a $30-million operation, according to its annual report, paying millions in honoraria to guest ministers and operating church satellite facilities in outstate Minnesota, Wisconsin, and downtown Minneapolis.

In 1995, Living Word spent $1.8 million to buy 91 acres of land at the southwest corner of highways 169 and 610. The property, where the church then planned to build its long-term home, is now worth $9.5 million, according to materials describing the current capital fundraising campaign. But Living Word has decided against building there: "In the past few years...the Spirit of God has clearly dealt with us to pursue selling the property and using the proceeds to help pay off/upgrade this [Brooklyn Park] facility."

The most sought-after of those upgrades is a parking ramp; Living Word administrators fear the awkward street parking in the industrial park surrounding the church may be discouraging converts. "Parking may not appear to be the most exciting building and expansion project that a church can consider, but such access is absolutely critical to fulfilling our destiny of reaching 5,500 additional people in the years ahead," church materials explain. "If we cannot get people to and through our doors on a regular basis, then we cannot impact their lives with the good news of Jesus Christ."

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