People could not stop talking about FloodGate. The church was a phenomenon in my hometown, and when I finally attended services there, I could see why. Bolin was less a pastor than he was a performer. He had traded his pulpit for a soapbox, riffing like it was open-mic night at a campus coffeehouse. He openly preyed on the political and cultural insecurities of his congregants. And it worked. The hardest part of witnessing all this was to see people I knew—people I respected and cared about from around the community—falling for this spiritual farce. Rather than being challenged and transformed
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