c. 1996 Religion News Service
OCEAN GROVE, N.J. _ The musical strains from a soaring pipe organ spread heavily throughout Ocean Grove’s Great Auditorium as 1,700 worshipers take their seats on a sweltering Sunday morning.
It’s a good, not great, crowd by the seaside religious resort’s summer standards, but when the choir is joined by the worshipers in a rendition of the hymn “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the effect is electric.
The unified voices drift outside, past the summer tent homes and their fluttering American flags, down Pilgrim Pathway and its rows of Victorian homes toward the oceanfront.
Like a land that time forgot, Ocean Grove, a tiny community nestled among the resort towns of New Jersey’s northern coast, remains unabashedly Christian. Each summer it attracts some of the great evangelists, preachers and religious names to its hall, a 6,500-seat monstrosity of wooden slats nearly the size of a football field.
Founded by Methodists so devout they forbade workers on the Great Auditorium from cursing, drinking or smoking during its construction, the town remains dry. Its blue laws banning cars on the streets on Sunday were struck down by the courts in 1979, but the beachfront is still closed Sunday mornings.
“The emphasis on the Gospel is at the heart of this place,” H. Eddie Fox, a nationally known preacher, said minutes after delivering the sermon last Sunday. “A lot of places have been established as Christian communities, but they’ve lost that emphasis. Ocean Grove keeps it going with no apology.”
Back in 1869, when the Methodists found what they believed to be the perfect location for their outdoor religious revivals _ called camp meetings _ the state Legislature obliged by giving them the land. Methodists immediately began pitching tents on the nearly square-mile site nestled between two small finger lakes and spending days at a time in fervent, outdoor prayer sessions.
A Camp Meeting Association was organized to set rules for the town and distribute property. One of its first rules was to ban all vehicles from the roads on Sundays. By 1874, gates had been erected at the Main Avenue entrance, one of two thoroughfares into town, and until 1979 they were locked up tight on Sundays.
Larry Jackson, executive director of the Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association, said that when residents came out for an Independence Day parade two weeks ago, it seemed evident the town “is as pure a slice of Americana as can be found in this nation.”
The Great Auditorium continues to be the town’s focal point. Bordered on one side by a peaceful park complete with old-fashioned gazebo and an antique tabernacle, the auditorium is separated from the ocean by a great, green lawn called Pilgrim Pathway.
On two other sides of the looming, 119-foot-high structure, rows of summer tent homes, complete with floors, plumbing and electricity, complete the idyllic scene. There are waiting lists of up to 10 years for the 114 tents, and renters must espouse Christian values.
Two blocks to the south, running parallel with Pilgrim Pathway, Main Avenue provides a quaint downtown, with pharmacies, gift shops and sidewalk cafes. Much of the rest of the town is residential, with the exception of the hotels and boarding homes. (The winter population of about 6,000 can swell to roughly 20,000 on busy summer weekends.)
Jackson, a Texas preacher with an MBA, said he’ll never forget his arrival in Ocean Grove three years ago. It was dusk, and the combination of sunset and old Victorian homes was breathtaking.
What Jackson didn’t realize, however, was that his arrival came at the height of a struggle Ocean Grove was waging over its very survival.
Crime was on the rise. Residents were up in arms over the number of deinstitutionalized mental patients living in their midst. And a vicious Nor’easter had destroyed the boardwalk the year before.
“We love this town,” Herbert Herbst, president of the 1,000-member Ocean Grove Homeowners Association, said in an interview recently. “We’ve been fighting for it for the past three or four years.”
Herbst scoffed at the suggestion, made in lawsuits against the association by boarding-home owners, that driving mental patients from town might be un-Christian. He said the people of the town _ Ocean Grove actually is a section of Neptune Township _ care about the mentally ill. But when the state allowed hundreds of former patients to be warehoused in substandard boarding homes, he said, the results were disastrous.
Politicians seem to agree. Gov. Christie Whitman responded to a steady stream of protest by the association and other Shore groups with a $4 million program to buy up offending boarding homes and distribute their residents in other communities. Two targeted in Ocean Grove brought the population down by at least 200, Herbst said.
While it’s not uncommon to see people mumbling conversations to themselves on the streets of Ocean Grove these days, the public urination and harassment of tourists by the deinstitutionalized that was rampant three years ago has virtually ceased, according to police.
Ginger Mulligan, executive director of the Mental Health Association of Monmouth County, agreed the state had placed too many former patients in Ocean Grove and other Shore towns, such as neighboring Asbury Park, without proper services.
“The people who sometimes get quoted from Ocean Grove who talk about getting rid of `those people,’ I think, represent a minority of people in town,” Mulligan said. “I think there are a lot of people in Ocean Grove who are living their Christian faith by extending themselves to the needy.”
Neptune Police Chief James Ward said the combination of state efforts to reduce the population of mentally ill, an aggressive neighborhood watch program and the locking of iron gates on bridges connecting Ocean Grove and Asbury Park have tamed an area once a headache for police.
“Things are not as bad as they used to be,” he said. “The everyday problems of people urinating in public and not taking their medication has quieted down.”
Also down are the number of strong-arm robberies, break-ins and car thefts along the northern lakefront.
Ward said things improved after police began locking the gates between midnight and 5 a.m., a move termed illegal by civil libertarians and racist by some other opponents.
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“It’s amazing when something happens how quick we are to blame someone else,” said Asbury Park Mayor Carl Williams. “I think a lot of their problems are problems from within.”
Williams said he is no longer an outspoken critic of the move, however. He termed it past history, but as the conversation continued, he couldn’t help but provide an even older bit of history.
“People forget how these towns were founded,” he said. “Ocean Grove came first, and they (the Methodist founders) were looking for someone who shared their religious beliefs. They found Mr. (James A.) Bradley who bought two lots there and then bought land that would become Asbury Park and Bradley Beach. That’s how the relationship was formed. I pray for their situation. They have the problem.”
Herbst acknowledged that some people have termed the locking of the gates racist, an effort to keep black people from Asbury Park out of predominantly white Ocean Grove. Last Sunday, bass singer Kevin Short, who thrilled the Great Auditorium audience with his solo, was one of a half-dozen blacks in the spacious hall.
In recent years, though, the Camp Meeting program committee has worked hard to diversify the race and sex of speakers. Jackson said when noted black preachers speak, the audience is much more racially mixed.
“We are turning the corner here and taking care of God’s square mile (as the section is known),” Herbst said. “It’s a beautiful community. It’s no longer Methodist, but all denominations. It’s a mixture of white, black and Spanish. The houses are close together here, and we have to live together.”
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Herbst and many other people in Ocean Grove say they believe things have improved in the past few years. It is an open question, however, whether the town can keep its historic flavor and emphasis on Christian teachings in a modern age.
In 1979, the state Supreme Court ruled that the Camp Meeting Association, which owns every property in town and leases the land to homeowners, could not run the town. It was a violation of the separation of church and state.
Down came the chains that barred all automobile traffic on Sundays, not to mention other Sunday bans on everything from ball playing to bicycles. Still, the association has retained some control.
Jackson said that every home buyer is interviewed by an association member. Local restaurants that encourage patrons to bring their own bottle receive letters reminding them of their Christian obligations. A Board of Architectural Review makes sure the Victorian buildings with their wrap-around porches and gingerbread trim are painted permitted colors, a muted range that runs from pastel lavenders to dark, rich browns and greens.
“We are committed to maintaining our traditions,” Jackson said. “Whether those traditions are coming back around in America, I sadly rather doubt it. But when you hear politicians talk about family values, this, in my opinion, is one of the most family-oriented communities in the country.
“There is no doubt in my mind we will continue,” he added. “The past is our future. We want to continue holding on to our Christian roots.”
MJP END CHAMBERS
