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Andre Hensley was pacing the sidewalk, flustered, when I showed up for the annual convention of the religious order founded by his late father. Hensley, a fleshy, focused man of 49, was in pleated khakis and a blue shirt and tie, his receding hair combed back off a broad forehead.
Considering that the 48-year-old Universal Life Church lists millions of members on its rolls, I expected at least some kind of crowd outside its world headquarters, a simple white-clapboard church on a leafy residential street in the San Joaquin Valley city of Modesto. Maybe traffic or confusion about the start time was holding people up, Hensley muttered as he ushered me into the church office. He offered me orange juice, made a few phone calls and went out to survey the street, where ranchera music drifted from the windows of shabby bungalows. When, with evident resignation, he finally led me into the church, a grand total of four people were in the rows of padded metal chairs facing the pulpit.
Perhaps two dozen more would drift through the church over the weekend. Though few in number, the attendees were abundant in spiritual diversity. There was Brother Don Manor, a balding flower wholesaler from San Marcos who had at various times followed Catholicism, Buddhism and Judaism and who used his turn at the pulpit to give a full-throated sermon denouncing the Bible as "a guide that is totally out of date." There was Minister Shirley Broussard of Long Beach, who has been hearing the voice of God and foreseeing the future since she was 7. There was a telephone faith healer from Florida and a pretty blond dancer who proselytizes to her Hollywood peers, "all the people with breast implants and butt implants and facial surgery, because they'll listen to someone who's like them."
Midway through the morning, a man with long stringy hair and an enormous beard wheeled a little red motor up to the pulpit. "Most of you have probably heard about the 200-mile-per-gallon carburetors," he began without preamble. Hensley nodded supportively from the front row as the man explained how this device could power an entire house and how we too could build one with materials available at any auto parts store.
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