Holy Roller
Finding Redemption and the Holy Ghost in a Forgotten Texas Church
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
Julie Lyons was working as a crime reporter when she followed a hunch into the South Dallas ghetto. She wasn’t hunting drug dealers, but drug addicts who had been supernaturally healed of their addictions. Was there a church in the most violent part of the city that prayed for addicts and got results?
At The Body of Christ Assembly, a rundown church on an out-of-the-way street, Lyons found the story she was looking for. The minister welcomed criminals, prostitutes, and street people–anyone who needed God. He prayed for the sick, the addicted, and the demon-possessed, and people were supernaturally healed.
Lyons’s story landed on the front page of the Dallas Times Herald. But she got much more than just a great story, she found an unlikely spiritual home. Though the parishioners at The Body of Christ Assembly are black and Pentecostal, and Lyons is white and from a traditional church background, she embraced their spirituality–that of “the Holy Ghost and fire.”
It’s all here in Holy Roller–the stories of people desperate for God’s help. And the actions of a God who doesn’t forget the people who need His power.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The former editor for the alternative weekly Dallas Observer, Lyons writes about her membership of nearly two decades in a poor South Dallas African-American Pentecostal church, the Body of Christ Assembly. Though she found the church as a reporter in search of a story about supernatural healing from crack cocaine addiction, she arrived a fully formed believer in search of her own healing from her attraction to women and her depression. The book tracks the lives of the founding pastor, Fredrick Eddington Sr., a onetime drug addict with schizophrenic tendencies who overcame his problems through faith, and his wife and co-pastor, Diane, a legally blind, captious woman for whom life is a tightrope between holiness and hell. Lyons writes searing and sympathetic portraits of the down-and-out black residents of South Dallas. But this slim memoir is short on historical, political and economic analysis and long on descriptions of moral sins, from the sexual to the selfish. The book's overwhelming emphasis on "deliverance" often runs up against the realities of poverty and exploitation. Lyons briefly acknowledges this during a church mission trip to Botswana, but never fully examines it. Readers looking for an intimate peek at black Pentecostal religiosity, in its successes and shortcomings, will appreciate the book.