Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, August 6, 1995 TAG: 9508040014
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By BETH MACY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Six years later, Kathy O'Keeffe walked into the same church and, eventually, became its associate pastor. She is white.
``Two amazing women of great integrity and great personal power leading one remarkable church,'' is how Hollins College theologian Alvord Beardslee describes it.
This is the story of their unlikely alliance, the story of Northwest Roanoke's Deliverance Church Ministries and its philosophy:
That only through God can the boundaries that separate us bring us back together.
|n n| The Rev. Lorraine Alston was a traveling evangelist in 1971 when God led her to hold a revival in Gainsboro's Mount Zion AME Church. God told the Franklin County native and Lucy Addison High School graduate to stay put, she says, to form an independent congregation of her own.
Early members recall services in the AME church before urban renewal demolished it in 1976. They also recall Alston's vision to build her own structure on a Northwest Roanoke hill.
``We were looking for a building,'' remembers Claudine English, one of the initial handful of members. ``But then she told us that God said to stop looking and build.''
Thirty church members raised $80,000 for the building by delivering mass dinners to such workplaces as Norfolk and Western Railway and Community Hospital - weekend after weekend, month after month.
``We sold ... string beans, fried chicken, sweet potato pies, potato salad,'' says English, who made the pies and chaired the fund-raising committee. ``Then we'd have out-of-town churches come in sometimes for services,'' English says. ``Our framework was done before we ever borrowed a penny.''
To save money, Alston personally managed the construction, garnering donations of work and supervising subcontractors. ``The Lord had shown me the building plan,'' recalls Alston.
He'd also shown her, through prayer, the church logo - a white dove flying over a cross. Painted behind the altar, it's a fitting backdrop for Alston, who stands behind the pulpit as church matriarch and spiritual leader.
Back in the '70s, Roanoke wasn't used to female leaders, especially black ones. Once, during a visit to City Hall for a building permit, a clerk told her: ``I tell you what, why don't you send the pastor down here instead?''
``I was on the radio from the beginning, and sometimes the other ministers would make derogatory remarks'' about women ministers, she says. ``But overall, I was so enthused in what God was directing to me, so elated, that I don't think it really bothered me.''
Deliverance is a charismatic, nondenominational church with an independent charter, meaning Alston reports only to her members.
``We teach the in-filling of the spirit,'' she says. ``We believe in a kingdom life, that the kingdom of God is now and it's within man. In other words, we believe that heaven is where Jesus is and that he lives within us.
``People are looking for something now,'' she adds. ``They don't want to wait till after they die to be at peace.''
|n n| While Lorraine Alston was building her church, Kathy O'Keeffe was building her social conscience. An undergraduate at Hollins College in the early '70s, she was student-government president and ``clearly the most important student leader on campus,'' her former professor, Alvord Beardslee, recalled in a recent phone interview from his Litchfield, Conn., home.
A Vietnam War protester and women's movement crusader, ``she made some very important criticisms of the college,'' he adds. ``She believed academic institutions and churches should do more on race relations than they do, and should share power.''
During the student-government meetings she presided over, O'Keeffe reminded Beardslee of Winston Churchill. ``She'd stand up there, and in this very deep, very measured voice, she'd make these very clear points,'' he recalls.
``And then everyone would agree with her.''
Looking back now, O'Keeffe, 46, calls her agnostic phase a ``period of arrogance.''
Raised in a middle-class home in Lynchburg, she was born a Methodist. But the idealism that peppered her speeches at Hollins also led her away from her traditional religion.
``As a youth, you think religion is hypocritical because you don't see the principles being carried out,'' she says. ``So you look in other areas for the truth.''
Out of college, O'Keeffe volunteered for Total Action Against Poverty. She took odd jobs - from bookkeeping to carpentry - and practiced photography on the side. She did not attend church.
In 1977, she remembers giving God an ultimatum: ``I said, `If you're real, God, show me.'''
On a Saturday morning two weeks later, she was fixing breakfast and flipping stations on her AM radio when she first heard the voice. It was the Rev. Lorraine Alston, preaching on a WTOY gospel program with two visiting ministers.
O'Keeffe stood still in her kitchen listening, mesmerized.
``I'd never heard such life and joy,'' she recalls.
``I mean, it sounded like they knew God personally.'' She decided right then she'd attend the next prayer meeting at Deliverance.
When she walked in a few nights later, the entire congregation was on its knees praying. O'Keeffe sat in a back chair, following their lead.
``I became overwhelmed with the presence of God,'' she recalls. ``I mean, I knew with an absolute surety that the presence of God was there.
``I was filled, really. It was like being able to almost reach out and touch God. My mind was just totally flooded.``
O'Keeffe doesn't remember much of what happened after the service. Just that she was awake half the night, everything within her charged, alert.
Everything within her rejoicing.
|n n| The first time Alston saw O'Keeffe, she knew the visitor needed help. ``I could just feel she wanted a better life,'' the pastor says.
So Alston did something she rarely does with first-time visitors to the church. At the end of the service, she called O'Keeffe up to the altar to pray for her.
At a service a week later, during a guest speaker's sermon, these words clicked in O'Keeffe's ear: ``You were born for a purpose.''
``And I just knew I was born to serve God,'' O'Keeffe says.
``It was like the heavenly being revealed. The choir that night was small, about 10 people - but I could've sworn I heard hundreds of voices.''
Within a month O'Keeffe was saved, baptized and had received the Holy Spirit. She began praying and studying the Bible intensively.
``I began to hear God's voice,'' she says.
Any time the church doors were open, O'Keeffe was there - for fund-raising meetings, noonday prayer meetings, evening services.
``She started just really giving herself,'' Alston recalls. ``She was always organizing a group, coming up with ideas of what we could do.''
O'Keeffe's call to the ministry came during a prayer at a building-fund meeting. Under Alston's guidance, she began to teach and minister. In five years, she was ordained.
Alston and O'Keeffe preach tolerance of other people, promoting outreach to the needy. Once a month they take their ministry to prison congregations in Craigsville and Staunton, as well as to the Our Lady of the Valley nursing home.
Church members videotape Sunday sermons, editing the service for weekly broadcasts on WEFC (Channel 38, 8:30-9 p.m. Saturdays).
And a recent fellowship with the predominantly white St. John's Episcopal Church has resulted in a cooperative home-building project for Habitat for Humanity.
When the Deliverance choir performed at St. John's recently, ``300 people burst into spontaneous applause,'' recalls the Rev. Tom O'Dell of St. John's. He and Alston are planning a pastor exchange this fall.
``God doesn't want us to separate because of denomination,'' Alston says. ``It's people who do that.''
Says O'Dell: ``There is so much that divides us. And to be given the grace to see beyond the divisions ... it has really opened our congregation's eyes.''
|n n| Alvord Beardslee is a Hollins College professor emeritus and a scholar of the burgeoning movement in ``spirit-filled,'' socially conscious churches like Deliverance.
``All the studies of prejudice indicate that as soon as you know someone from the `despised' group whom you have to admire, then suddenly things change,'' he says.
O'Keeffe's rise in the 90 percent black church didn't startle him. ``The social issues she dealt with in college, they're very much the same issues she's dealing with today, only from a different point of view.''
Her presence in the church didn't raise eyebrows among the congregation, either, member Cheryl Hilton says, nor was she the first white to join the church.
``It was the freedom that kept her coming back. She knew that this was that one place where she could really be herself. I remember during [non-choir songs], Kathy would come in and she'd be louder than anybody.''
O'Keeffe and Alston complement each other well, she adds. O'Keeffe handles the daily workings of the 130-member church, while Alston is the church's visionary.
``Kathy will get out behind the church and help build the playground,'' Hilton says.
Whereas Pastor, as she is referred to by members, ``is kind of this dainty person. ... She always talks to the women about carrying yourself, being dignified, because your life is about something and you're representing not only yourself but Christ.''
With their different styles and diverse backgrounds - O'Keeffe has never married, while Alston is divorced with two grown children - there's rarely an issue that comes up that one of them can't handle, members say.
From counseling a member who has faced racial discrimination, to helping a member cope with cancer. ``Financial management, education, children - together, they leave no subjects uncovered,'' member Evy Pait says.
Together they have vacationed in France, and led the choir on a ropes course at Hollins.
Together they've taught young men how to escort their mothers to church, instructed teen-agers on table manners and organized food drives for the needy.
Together they've counseled blacks and whites, rich and poor.
``We all grow up with prejudices - not just racial, but prejudices of what's acceptable intellectually, socially, economically,'' O'Keeffe says. ``But when you yield to the Holy Spirit, it teaches you to love everybody regardless of the circumstances they're in.
``So often our relationships are limited to the work environment and where you live, socialize or go to church. But by being so exclusively in our own vein, we're missing the uniqueness and the resources of what our nation's all about.''
``Of course it's safer that way. But it's not as exciting as it is when you cross those lines.''
On a recent 90-degree Saturday, nowhere was that excitement more tangible than on the bare lawn of the new Habitat for Humanity house on Kellogg Avenue. Members from Deliverance and St. John's shared in the dedication of the new home.
The groups joined to recite a litany, then listened as Alston led an impassioned prayer and read from a poem written by Deliverance member Darlene Johnson:
One extraordinary piece of why we celebrate today is two entirely different congregations, working in unity, finding strength, day by day.
To close the service, the group planted the lawn's first trees. Video cameras from both churches whirred to capture the moment - hands clenching dirt, shovels clanking, hoses drenching the earth.
And the simple novelty of blacks and whites coming together, planting two small trees, together, under a very hot sun.
Deliverance Church Ministries, 2002 Mercer Ave. N.W., holds Sunday services from 11 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Sunday school starts at 9:30 a.m. 345-6676.
Unique Northwest Roanoke church delivers a message of tolerance and unity
by CNB