A spiky-haired woman in ripped jeans hangs out with musician John Cooper, frontman for the Christian crossover alt-rock band Skillet.
Looking more like a band groupie than a preacher, she is Sarah Bowling: wife and mother and the daughter of world-renowned Christian evangelist Marilyn Hickey.
As senior pastor of Orchard Road Christian Center with its membership of thousands, Bowling, 38, is one of a few daughters who received the mantle from her mother.
More commonly, men pass their ministry to sons: Billy and Franklin Graham, Oral and Richard Roberts, or Kenneth Hagin Sr. and Kenneth Hagin Jr.
The Grammy-nominated band will rock the church tonight, but first, promptly at 7, television cameras start to roll, and Bowling revs up to interview the band for “Today with Marilyn and Sarah,” the popular mother-daughter daily Bible show broadcast on the Trinity Broadcasting Network to as many as 1.5 billion households in 49 countries.
“How did you hook up with Jesus?” she asks each musician.
Eventually, she cuts to her passion: the next generation.
“If you look across America, as far as young people, they don’t really connect with Christ,” she says to Cooper. “So how do you see Skillet bridge some of this gap?”
His eyes gleam. Rock, his chosen evangelistic tool, opens him to a vast new world.
“We’re doing more secular venues, we’re signed to Atlantic Records, so I’m meeting more non-Christians than I’ve met in my whole life,” he says.
“I’ve been getting their view of Christianity and learned that a lot of people in America have a major problem with Christianity.
“But they don’t have a major problem with Jesus. When you talk to them about Jesus, they’re like, ‘I’m on board with that, because that’s cool. But I don’t like Christianity.’ ”
Bowling nods as the musician speaks, listening intently.
“Yeah, religion kinda clouds the issue,” she says. “Because it brings in the human nastiness that we just hate, and it clouds who Jesus really is.”
She can relate. She too endured a period of serious doubt about her faith.
Raised by parents on the cutting edge of charismatic Christianity – Wallace and Marilyn Hickey, who in 1960 started the Full Gospel Chapel with 27 people – Bowling felt a call to the ministry at age 14.
But during the summer of 1989, just before her senior year at Oral Roberts University, she experienced a dark night of the soul, while in Germany studying for her bachelor’s degree in German.
She felt isolated and lonely. “I cried out to God, saying, ‘I’m trying to find you, but I can’t hear or find you.’
“I read the Bible, but my eyes felt like dead wood in my head. I was angry with God, I felt he turned his back on me. I thought, ‘Just forget it.”‘
She explored Islam and Buddhism. She seriously considered Hinduism. Eventually, however, the concept of reincarnation struck her as a cycle of hopelessness. So she kept seeking, until she read Christian apologist C.S. Lewis’ collection of radio addresses, “Mere Christianity.”
“He wrote that God designed a human who was inherently selfish, and we can use that to build a relationship with him,” Bowling says. “That turned a light on for me.”
This six-month experience as a seeker made her faith stronger and gifted her with a deeper understanding of her generation and how to speak to it.
“It’s very important to be authentic, sincere, and very cognizant of relational importance,” she says. “For my generation, ‘Friends’ was the classic TV show. It personified our values, what we liked and didn’t like, and how our relationships were fundamental to our identity.
“For me this is an awesome opportunity, because Jesus didn’t come into our world to create a religion. He came to create a relationship.”
Inheriting the mantle of her famous mother offers both opportunity – especially for helping the next generation – and challenge.
“Reece and I are still trying to find our groove,” she says of her husband and co-pastor. “More and more, we’re finding our own identity.”
Reece Bowling says this involves giving the stamp of their own personality to a congregation that’s had the same leadership for 45 years.
“We want to respect tradition and authority, but at the same time, to do what we have to – go forward, and project onward,” he says.
She’s both athletic and bookish, preaching one day, and snowboarding the next. Favorite phrases include “Awesome!” and “I dig the Bible!”
She’s modern, getting her spiky haircuts at the trendy Flirt salon in Denver’s artsy-bohemian South Gaylord neighborhood.
And she’s traditional, an old-time faith healer in a post-Christian world, where many no longer believe in miracles.
She’s rooted in charismatic Christianity, which believes that today’s Christians should be able to tap into the same manifestations of the Holy Spirit as did members of the early church: speaking in tongues, prophesy, healing and miracles.
At a healing meeting in Russia eight years ago, after Bowling prayed, a woman came up to her.
“She was flapping her arm, and flipping out,” says Bowling.
Mystified, she asked the translator to explain. He said the woman had a growth in her arm the size of an orange that had just disappeared.
As Bowling listened, she stared at the woman’s arm.
“It was twice the size of the other arm, and the hand was ashen gray. But I saw that hand turn the same color as her other one, and I saw the arm shrink down to the size of the other arm. It just pretty much rocked me.”
At times, however, she’s skeptical.
“I don’t believe it,” she says. “I think, ‘You just want to be in front of the crowd because you think it’s cool or whatever.’ Sometimes I have them go back and bring up their mom or dad, someone who knows them, because I tend to be a little bit, ‘I don’t believe this.”‘
And, in the wider Christian world, there is some skepticism over certain aspects of Marilyn Hickey Ministries, like the point in their broadcasts when Marilyn and Sarah offer bottles of anointing oil, prayed over by Oral Roberts, free when a certain amount of money is pledged to the ministry.
Some say this is like the ancient Catholic practice of selling indulgences, a way to raise money for the coffers. But the mother-daughter team, discussing healing and miracles on their daily TV show, say these items – anointing oil, prayer cloths, red cords to be hung in the window, based on the biblical story of Rahab – are merely “points of contact” that activate the faith that leads to healing.
“We want to help people connect to the power of God, and the solutions of God, and his miraculous healing power,” as Bowling said recently on their show, explaining a ministry letter that included chopsticks as a helpful faith activator.
There is tremendous power to faith, she says, but she also knows believers who are deeply rooted in faith and don’t get cured.
“You have to realize God is sovereign,” she says. “He’s not my puppet. When he doesn’t heal somebody, am I disappointed? Of course. But at the end of the day, it’s his decision and not mine. I’m here to serve him.”
This fall, Bowling returned to Germany as part of the Million Leaders Mandate sponsored by a non-profit group. She was there to teach biblical leadership principles to people of all political and cultural backgrounds.
This January, she’ll lead a mission trip back to Cambodia, where she’ll visit orphanages as part of her new global outreach organization, worldchild, which provides clothing, food, medical assistance and housing to kids in places like Darfur, Romania, Thailand and Cambodia.
She’s also starting a pilot program in Denver called Revolution, gathering youth pastors and leaders to consider effective tools – like concerts or youth summits – to reach the next generation of faithful.
Bowling is growing the outreach efforts slowly, however, while juggling her life as a wife and mother of three kids under age 6, always seeking balance between family and ministry.
Just as she learned to own her religion through the process of seeking, so does she want her children to authentically experience their religion, not have it imposed upon them.
“I can’t think of anything I want more in the world than my kids to have that,” she says. “That depth. The essential part of them connecting with the essential God.”
