Men Crowd Kingdome For God -- Promise Keepers Opens Rally

With thousands of men stacked from floor to ceiling, Promise Keepers '95 rolled into the Kingdome last night in a din of music and cheering and with a pledge to help participants become better fathers, husbands and "godly influences" in their communities.

The Dome, with some 65,000 men, took on the atmosphere of a huge tent revival as beach balls, balloons and paper airplanes sailed through the air, along with shouts of an obviously enthusiastic crowd.

The Rev. Bob Moorehead, senior pastor of Overlake Christian Church in Kirkland, opened the rally by praising Promise Keepers.

"I believe it is the grass-roots movement that God has started raising up just a few years ago that is going to deliver a message to this nation: That we need to come back under the sovereign hand of God in this country," Moorehead said.

"This is not a wimp session tonight," he told them, inviting them to confess their sins and accept Christ as their savior. "We are men of God . . . men of courage." Thousands, some arm in arm, responded to the altar call.

Bill McCartney, former University of Colorado football coach and co-founder of Promise Keepers, said he envisioned the Christian men's movement spreading from the inner cities of America to points around the world.

McCartney decried the "downward spiral of morality" in the country.

"We are calling these men to be fathers to the fatherless, to be part of dissolving the gangs, and to come alongside the oppressed," McCartney said at a news conference before the two-day Promise Keepers convention, which ends tonight.

McCartney said Promise Keepers, an evangelical Christian men's movement, has been wrongly portrayed as promoting itself at the expense of women. One critic described the organization as demanding the absolute submission of women to men.

To the contrary, McCartney said Promise Keepers believes "the man comes alongside his wife, and collectively they make decisions" pertaining to the family. "The problem has been the man has not been home."

He said his message to women was, "There is hope; don't give up. These men who have never had a clue, they're starting to get a clue" about how to take responsibility and commit themselves to family, community and church and God.

Randy Phillips, president of Promise Keepers, and Bishop Phillip Porter, Promise Keepers board chairman and senior pastor of All Nations Pentecostal Center in Aurora, Colo., said the organization is meeting with leaders of minority congregations and the Catholic Church to bolster their participation. "We are here to celebrate our diversity and unity in the Lord Jesus Christ," said Porter, who is African American.

The Kingdome teemed with men from throughout the Northwest and as far away as Florida, according to local Promise Keepers organizers.

While the Promise Keepers movement has drawn criticism as being allegedly anti-gay and anti-women, no protests materialized outside the Kingdome. Though the event was open only to men, some 20 percent of the 1,800 volunteers helping out with the Seattle gathering were women, Phillips said.

At $55 a person, the event is expected to raise more than $3 million, the balance of which, after expenses, will help fund the national Promise Keepers budget, which has now grown to $64 million since the organization's inception in 1990.

The Seattle gathering is the ninth of 13 major conferences in the U.S. this year. It is the seventh of nine sellouts. All four remaining conferences, at sports stadiums in Minneapolis; St. Petersburg, Fla.; Oakland, Calif.; and Dallas, are sold out, organizers said.

Participant Aaron Haskins, a Seattle banking officer and former basketball player at Washington State University, said before the start of the event that his only explanation for the huge turnout at the Kingdome and other stadiums was the"hand of God moving throughout the country to bring men back to commitment and true leadership."

True biblical leadership, he added, was not based on domination, but the servanthood model of Jesus.

"That is what a real man is," said Haskins. "A real man is a servant."