FULL OF PROMISE

TODAY IS CHAIR DAY. IT’S 8:15 A.M. Wednesday in a large windowless office across the hall from the Dallas Cowboys locker room. Over a bagel-and-orange-juice breakfast, Promise Keepers members are planning. Two days from now, nearly 60,000 men will arrive at this huge sports arena, eager to proclaim love for their wives and Jesus. “This is the day the stage goes up, and we need electricity in every place at once,” notes a staff member. “So be thoughtful.” Says another: “This should be a pretty short day, so that means fewer areas for Satan to enter into. We need to keep the little rascal under control.” Everybody laughs. Confidently. They join in a moment of prayer. Then talk turns to the need to get hold of some CB radios.

Where’s the hubbub? Where’s the panic? Randy Phillips, the 43-year-old president of Promise Keepers, would be surprised to hear about any. “This is our 20th [rally],” he says. “By now it’s natural.”

Indeed, the holy pandemonium unleashed in Dallas last Friday night–the final big Promise Keepers’ rally until next March–came off with all the polish of the final production of a monster season. It is a season whose offstage saga is already well known. In 1990 then University of Colorado football coach Bill McCartney, disturbed by the state of his family and his nation, concocted the idea of Christian, men-only stadium rallies. That idea became Promise Keepers, a combination Super Bowl game and revival meeting, with the added twist that participants sign a list of seven promises, including pledges to maintain sexual fidelity, build a strong marriage and participate in church.

The notion soon exploded into one of the century’s fastest-growing religious phenomena, shooting from an attendance of 4,200 in 1991 to 279,000 in 1994. In 1995 the number of men paying $55 to listen to soft Christian rock and hard Christian preaching and weep in one another’s arms mounted to an astounding 727,000. Here is an army just as impressive, in its own way, as its mirror phenomenon, Louis Farrakhan’s march on Washington–more impressive, actually, in that Farrakhan is only now grappling with the issues of follow-through. Promise Keepers, with 21 state offices in addition to its Denver headquarters, has a blueprint for the future, and is well on its way to making it a reality. Says James Davison Hunter, an authority on American Protestantism at the University of Virginia: “It has managed its growth extremely well, without losing its sense of mission.”

Phillips admits that his group has had its share of the bends. Mechanical systems have failed it, as when a long-distance carrier once announced it could not handle 30,000 incoming calls to its 800 number within two hours. And people who sometimes found themselves crowded five to an office, as staff doubled roughly every half year, were also tested. “If you don’t like change,” says Ed McCampbel, a regional event manager, “don’t come to Promise Keepers. You might work with someone, and when you go back you’re working with someone who works under the person you dealt with before. We are creating policy before there’s a policy manual written down.” Phillips says the group’s “core values, its integrity,” were saved only through “heroic commitment” and prayer.

When the movement first sprang to prominence last year, it seemed to be a one-man show, and that man seemed more a visionary than a manager. But McCartney, who gave up his coaching job in July, appears to realize this. He still speaks last at every rally, pitching the seven promises and leading an ovation for attending clergy, but he takes no salary and leaves day-to-day operations to Phillips and seven “department heads.” Their pay, in the $60,000 to $95,000 range, was set by canvassing other religious organizations. “There’s no one single brilliant strategist,” says the Rev. Glenn Wag-ner, a vice president. “We had a consultant observe the management team once and he said, ‘I wouldn’t give a plugged nickel for any of you individually, but together, I’ve never seen anything like it.’ “

And in fact, things do seem to get done, and done right. Brian Carter, a chief financial officer in a Dallas law firm who was local coordinator for last weekend’s volunteers, attended his first rally in Boulder, Colorado, in 1993; on his return he helped create a 200-member men’s ministry in his home church. Six months ago, provided with only an elaborate organizational chart by the Denver headquarters, he and his task force began culling 32 “team leaders” from 25 Dallas-area churches. They in turn trolled for the rally’s foot soldiers, eventually enlisting 2,500.

These came from all walks of life to perform all sorts of tasks. One thousand, trained as “evangelism volunteers,” counseled those who committed to Jesus on the revival’s first night; 700 others were tapped to hawk the coffee mugs, T shirts and other accessories that earn the organization millions each year. And 65 recently released prisoners and recovering addicts now in local church programs set up tarpaulins and folding chairs to supplement the stadium’s seating capacity. In recruiting, says Carter, expertise counts less than faith. “We want people who pray, so God does [the work] through them.”

During each big rally, attendees are invited to take a nine-hour leadership seminar. The graduates–“ambassadors” tapped by Promise Keepers and “key men” nominated by local pastors–then work at establishing men’s ministries and small discussion groups among churches in their area. Such liaisons are still rare in the Northeast, which has yet to experience its first stadium rally. But in Promise Keepers’ home state of Colorado, the group is now working with 800 congregations.

Eventually, Promise Keepers hopes the grass-roots ministries will supplant its big-arena events, which vice president Wagner maintains are just “a catalyst and motivator.” Danny Byram, a former pop-gospel performer who now books talent for the rallies, predicts, “The stadium thing will probably be phased out eventually, and I’ll go back to doing concerts.”

But that day is not yet at hand, and the group’s plans for future rallies are bigger than ever. It is in the process of reserving 23 stadiums for 1996, with several more possible; the intended audience approaches 1.5 million. The group’s total budget, $64 million for 1995, is expected to jump commensurately. A Promise Keepers’ meeting of pastors next February in Atlanta’s Georgia Dome could turn out to be the biggest gathering of clergy in U.S. history. Finally, in 1997, Promise Keepers will attempt an event they had originally planned for 1996, only to see their thunder stolen by Farrakhan: a Washington march.

The ethnic makeup of that march will be worth keeping an eye on. Promise No. 6 is the pledge to reach “beyond any racial and denominational barriers to demonstrate the power of biblical unity.” William Martin, a Rice University sociologist who specializes in modern revival movements, suggests that this multiracialism is the one part of the Promise Keepers’ program “that would be moving participants to a new position, rather than reinforcing beliefs they already hold. It could have a remarkably beneficial result if enough blacks can be made to see that it is serious–not just 10,000 white guys looking for five black guys to hug–and they move it back into their communities and establish relationships with black churches and black men.” For now, though, Promise Keepers remains an overwhelmingly white movement.

Martin warns that Promise Keepers must keep alert for all the usual pitfalls facing fast-growing revival movements: financial monkeyshines, personal malfeasance and demagoguery. “There is no doubt that the leaders of the religious right will see this as a major resource,” he notes, “and seek to strengthen ties with it. There is a danger it might be hijacked.” (In fact, Promise Keepers has no official position on abortion, and its disapproval of homosexuality is stated in considerably more neutral terms than McCartney’s own brutal remarks in the past.) Martin also shares with some of the movement’s feminist critics an unease about Promise Keepers’ position on the man’s authority within the family.(a speaker once wrote that men should “treat the lady gently and lovingly–but lead”). He notes, however, that “even in Evangelical churches today there are a lot of women in the work force,” and “working-women are less likely to be subservient to their masterful husbands.”

In fact, 30% of Promise Keepers’ volunteer force is female. Dawn Grubb, 35, was one of that number until last March, when she began supervising volunteers as a paid staff member in Denver. Dallas is her eighth event this year. “At first I looked at my job as being behind the scenes,” she says. “But I discovered that the women say to one another, ‘Let’s talk; I’m so excited about what’s happening to my husband, my son, my brother, my life.’ God is really working with people one on one about the need to build relationships, men with men, women with women, wives with husbands, parents with children.”

As Grubb speaks, registration and sales tents rise behind her. “When I began volunteering we thought of it as a Denver thing or a Colorado thing,” she says. “Now it’s going across the U.S. and starting into Canada and other countries. The Lord expects more from us, as we’re ready.”

–Reported by Richard N. Ostling/Denver and Dallas