In Jesus Name

We believe in one God eternally existing in three persons; namely, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost

Summer 1995

I was eight when I had my first doctrinal conflict.

Who do I believe?

What do I believe?

A year after we arrived in America, my mom's friend introduced us to a small church on the east side of Bridgeport, housed in what used to be a funeral home — East Bridgeport Church of God. A few big families anchored the place. It felt like family because it mostly was. The pastor was 27. His wife was about 36. They had a boy of six and a girl of four, and the whole congregation organized itself around them.

I kept asking my mom to come with me. Eventually she did. She hadn't played keyboard since high school — technically she'd backslid — but she became the church's keyboard player anyway. We weren't just attending. We were in.

That same summer I went back to Jamaica for four weeks. I brought 'Til Shiloh on cassette and played it the whole flight. Buju performed in Bridgeport later that summer, and somehow I ended up backstage. He nodded at me like an uncle would. Like he knew something about who I was going to be.

Jamaica was where I learned my Bridgeport church was wrong.

My grandma's church, Richmond Apostolic, was Oneness Pentecostal — Jesus only. Father, Son, and Holy Ghost weren't three persons. They were three names for one. To call them three was to worship more than one God, and to be baptized in three names instead of one was to be baptized into nothing at all.

The consequence was hell. Or missing the rapture. Grandma never said it loud. She didn't have to. She handed me her books and let them say it, and at her kitchen table I read the arguments — the verses, the genealogies of the doctrine, the names of the men who'd gotten it wrong and the men who'd gotten it right. By the end of four weeks I knew where I stood.

I came back to Bridgeport quiet about it. I sat in the pews. I sang the songs. But every Sunday when the pastor closed with In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, I added under my breath:

In Jesus' name.

If I was going to follow anybody's doctrine, it was going to be Grandma's.