Dan and Ann Stratton are a Wall Street power couple, even if Wall Street doesn’t know it. Dan is a tall, blond, muscular Minnesota boy turned Yale football star who, by the time he was 30, had parlayed his college connections into a small fortune as a commodities trader. Today, at 47, he is the founder and pastor of Faith Exchange Fellowship, a fundamentalist Christian congregation in Manhattan’s financial district. He is also a “five-fold minister” of Yahweh, a self-described evangelist, apostle and prophet, and spiritual warrior king. Ann is a North Jersey Catholic schoolgirl turned born-again miracle worker, a lithe beauty with deeply sympathetic eyes and a sexy wardrobe ”” Carmela Soprano endowed with Protestant superpowers ”” whose prayers once supposedly raised a German au pair from the dead on the street in front of the Blue Moon Mexican Cafe in Englewood, N.J.
Together they are on a mission to banish Satan from the financial temples of Wall Street and transform New York City into “ChristTown.” But first they have to find a decent piece of downtown real estate.
Usually, Faith Exchange Fellowship holds its Sunday services in a ballroom at the Marriott Financial Center Downtown Hotel on West Street, at least for the past five years, since they lost their permanent home on 9/11. The most recent Sunday I was there, a congregation of about 400 had gathered. They stood for half an hour before the service began, clapping and dancing to gospel tunes. The singing was led by Carolyn Miller, who once toured in a national company of “The Wiz,” and a small choir that includes professionals who perform in clubs and shows around New York. The band featured Billy (Spaceman) Patterson, a local guitar legend who has played with Miles Davis and James Brown and whose current night job was musical director of Melvin Van Peebles’s raunchy off-Broadway musical, “Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death.”
Faith Exchange Fellowship attracts a lot of downtown artists and performers. It is probably the only fundamentalist church in the country whose active members include a radical feminist poet, a homeless transsexual and a fellow who specializes in choreographing Shakespearian fight scenes.
This suits Dan Stratton, who once took private opera classes at Lincoln Center, just fine. “A lot of my Yale friends regard me as a bigot, close-minded, sophomoric, a redneck,” he says. “But when it comes to sin, my motto is: fight the demand, not the supply. The Bible says homosexuality is an abomination, but I don’t sermonize about that or come down too hard on it. The artists in my church wouldn’t be there if I did. I let the Bible speak for itself on the subject of what is and isn’t a sin.”
Interesting article. However, a factual problem reveals the author’s ignorance about his subject. Pentecostal/charismatic does not equal Fundamentalist. True Fundamentalists are deeply opposed to claims of present day speaking in tounges and other gifts.
An excellent article. The only thing I found sad was the surprise I felt at a largely sympathetic article like this appearing in the New York Times. It’s a welcome rebuke to cynicism.
I’m intrigued at their take on Trinitarian theology. In all my seminary classes, I never realized that the name of the Trinity was “Eloihim”.