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The Rev. John Lowe pumps his fists and jumps up and down while a Christian rock band revs up his church congregation.
When the music ends, Lowe jogs to the podium and begins his Wednesday night address at Warsaw’s New Life Christian Church.
“It feels good to be in the house of the Lord,” he says in a deep Southern drawl. He’s wearing an untucked collared shirt and shiny, pointed loafers. As the church falls silent, he mentions a meeting the night before, when church members had gathered at his house for a birthday party and ended up speaking openly about their wildest sins.
Although the stories were wild, few were likely as crazy as his.
Lowe, a former college football lineman with a penchant for weightlifting and gold chains, has an unconventional past, but that hasn’t prevented him and his wife, Debbie, a former prostitute, from building Warsaw’s largest charismatic church. The Lowes think they’ve found a way to keep their congregation strong – by being open about their past, admitting that nobody’s perfect and extending a loving hand to anyone who walks through the door.
“I was a sinner, and man, I was good at sinning,” says Lowe, 53, who was once an adulterer with a steroid addiction. “Sometimes, the greatest way to help people is to say, ‘Look, our life was a mess, too.’ ”
Charismatic Christians, who believe in miraculous healing and speaking in tongues, are part of the “renewalist” movement, the fastest-growing religious group in the United States, according to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. Renewalist is an umbrella term for both Pentecostals and charismatics.
(While Pentecostals are Protestant, charismatics can come from Protestant or Catholic denominations or worship at independent churches such as Lowes’).
The Lowes partly attribute New Life’s growth to their willingness to share their story – one that might cause traditional Christians to shift uncomfortably in their pews. They’ve even told their story on “The 700 Club” ( www.700club.org), which occasionally airs a video about their lives.
Lowe met Debbie at a topless bar near Kenova, W.Va., in 1976. Debbie, then 18, was a top-line stripper from New York who was a prostitute on the side. She’d been molested when she was 4 and raped in high school. Depressed and rebellious, she left home at 16. She’d been brought up religious and read the Bible with other strippers when she wasn’t performing.
Lowe, 20 at the time, was a local football star with a drug-dealing brother who hadn’t stepped in a church in years. The night Lowe walked into the bar where Debbie was working, she had just discovered that her boyfriend, whom she wanted to marry, already had a wife.
“I was devastated,” says Debbie, a tall, expressive brunette. “I said to my girlfriend that the next guy who walked through the door was mine. John walks in, and I said, ‘Come here, blondie,’ and I grabbed him and kissed him and let him go and went back to work. I was pretty lit up at the time.”
The couple dated for two weeks, John proposed, and they were married two weeks later.
“And after that, we had three years of hell,” Lowe says.
After they married, Debbie quit stripping, and the Lowes moved to Salem, W.Va., where Lowe played football for Salem University. The couple moved into a small apartment and lived on $150 a month. Lowe stole college furniture for the apartment and food from the college cafeteria. The couple began fighting, and Debbie turned to religion as a means to cope.
“I thought she was psycho,” Lowe says, laughing. “I’d come home and she’d be on her knees, watching Pat Robertson or someone.” Eventually, Lowe began to cheat.
“I did pretty good for a while,” he says, “but then I started messing around with any woman in sight.”
Lowe says he had about 30 affairs before his wife found out and the couple split up. Debbie went back to her ex-boyfriend and to stripping.
A few weeks after she left Lowe, she opened her Bible one morning and the pages fell open to verses in I Corinthians 7 that warn not to leave an unbelieving spouse who wants to remain married.
“It was God talking to me,” Debbie said. “I knew he was talking to me when I found that verse.”
Determined to save her marriage, Debbie got in the car and drove back to Lowe, who met her at the door with divorce papers. Easter weekend was approaching, however, and Debbie somehow persuaded Lowe to join her on the ride back to Kenova. During the ride, Debbie kept begging him to go to church with her on Easter Sunday, Lowe says.
“I finally said to her, ‘OK, OK,’ ” Lowe says. “ ‘If I go to a church with you on Easter, after, you have to get in the car and leave and never come back.’ ”
A few days later, the couple were sitting in church when Lowe heard the altar call and had an overwhelming desire to “get right with God.”
“I was violating my own beliefs,” he says. “I knew the difference between right and wrong.”
Lowe wanted to be saved but didn’t want to make a scene in front of the congregation.
“I said, ‘If I go down there and do that prayer, you’re not going to start crying, are you?’ And instantly she started crying, and I got ticked off. But I still went there and prayed the prayer. I got saved ticked, and God still took me.”
After dedicating their lives to Christ, the Lowes started looking for a church that would teach them how to become good Christians. At Debbie’s urging, the two visited Agape Family Worship Center, a charismatic church in Canton, Mich., that her parents had spoken highly of.
“(The Agape leaders) were happy, and they acted like they genuinely loved you and cared for you,” Lowe says. “The people seemed to have a peace and joy about them, and at the churches I had been to everybody seemed kind of sullen, kind of serious and kind of boring.”
The two lived in Michigan for a year before moving to Broken Arrow, Okla., where they took courses at RHEMA Bible Training Center. From there, they moved to Peru, where they were hired as pastors at a local church. The fit wasn’t right, though, and so they decided to start their own church.
“I said, ‘God, there has to be somewhere else in the entire world where you can use us,’ ” Lowe says. “I fasted and prayed for two weeks. And I felt like God said, ‘Warsaw,’ so we took one of our days off and checked it out. I resigned, and we moved there two weeks later.”
The Lowes held their first church service in their basement in 1983. That year, they had six members and an annual income of $3,000. Today, they have a 60,000-square-foot church with a basketball court, coffee shop, youth center and skateboard ramp; 600 members; and a combined income of $4,000 a month. Three years ago, they built a spacious, two-story home for their four children and terrier Louis Vuitton.
“It’s a highly unusual testimony for most pastors,” Debbie, now 52, says of her story. “But we were raw sinners who needed a savior, and God transformed our lives.”
Since the Lowes started their church, their ministry work has taken them to India, Ukraine, Ireland, England and several other countries.
(After Lowe finished his Wednesday sermon, he was followed by a visiting Dutch pastor – one of the couple’s many friends they’ve met abroad.)
They’ve also traveled the world to host marriage conferences.
“My marriage now is awesome,” Lowe says. “We were one signature way from divorce 30 years ago, and today Debbie and I are deeply in love.”
“The 700 Club” contacted the Lowes in 2006, after a guest pastor affiliated with the show spoke at their church and heard their story. The show then made a brief video about the couple that aired on Easter and Valentine’s Day.
Although the Lowes don’t go out of their way to broadcast their story, they’re happy to share it whenever they meet someone who might need hope or encouragement. They’re human, they say. And being open about their past sins makes New Life accessible to all.
“Other than the obvious, like that we pray, the key to our success is that we don’t forget where we came from, and because of that, when we meet people who are broken from life, we love them,” Lowe says. “We don’t make them feel like they’re inferior or that they’re screwed up. Some people believe you have to ‘Get right to be right.’ But that’s not true. God just takes you as the mess you are and cleans you up.”
