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Understanding the
entire picture of this church is not as easy as I had initially
thought. I started this project with my head full of ideas and theories
that I as an outsider was going to “put onto” this “impoverished,
Appalachian, coal-industry oppressed, serpent-handling church.” As I
look back on the first paper that I wrote about this congregation (which
I have banished to the far reaches of my computer’s hard drive), the
entire premise of my thesis was based on a “fact” that I now see is
false. I had decided even before my first visit to the Church of the
Lord Jesus that the experience of becoming a vessel for the works of
the Holy Ghost must be giving these “deprived peoples” a sense of
empowerment that they don’t get in their everyday lives. Although I am
not denying that most of the signs followers I have met feel that they
have the power of the Lord within them when they are anointed, I am
denying my initial assumption that they are “deprived peoples.” They may
have seemed deprived to my naïve eyes, but that was because I, with the
best of intentions of course, was using my own middle-class, suburban
Maryland, cultural background and was imposing that upon my view of
these individuals. I was looking at the comparative poverty I saw in
McDowell County, (where the Jolo church is located) through somewhat
tainted eyes. The statistics for McDowell County, in comparison to the
national statistics of poverty, appear to be quite compelling (the per
capita market income is a mere 32.8% of the national average,
the unemployment rate is 260.8% of the national average,
and the 1990 Census reported a poverty rate at 287.5% of the national
average).
However, what I have come to realize is that many of the individuals
living in that area do not define their lives in terms of the middle
class values used to set the standards for mainstream America.
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