Tammy Fae: Mentor (!) to Emerging Church

object width="425" height="350">No one knows me would ever guess I would be posting about Tammy Fae (former wife of Jim Baker); unless it was a reminder of what Christian television "shouldn't" look like. But here's a clip of her on Larry King, two days before she died. And I wish Christian television looked more like this more often.

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And it was channel surfing to Tammy Faye (along with Robert Tilton..that's another story) who in an episode of PTL where she asked a guest ...a woman with no arms...what I thought was completely the wrong question: "How do you put on your makeup?" helped my wife and I decide to put our TV away over twenty years ago!

Check this:

In a 2000 interview with Larry King, Jay Bakker said, "I actually really look up to my mom for her makeup because so many people have made fun of her, and given her such a hard time. And she's just said basically, 'Screw it, I'm going to be me.' … For some reason, we've made people believe that they have to take off their makeup, change their hair color and comb their hair before they come to church. And that's just a lie and it's a lie from hell."

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A wonderful article in Christianity Today should also be reckoned with:

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Resurrecting the Public Death

Tammy Faye reminded us how to die.

Rob Moll | posted 7/27/2007 08:53AM

I paid little attention to Tammy Faye Bakker during her PTL days. But I gave her close scrutiny the day before she died, when she appeared on Larry King Live. Her eyes, which formerly sparkled with an indomitable spirit, had faded. Tammy Faye's mascara, her trademark even when it ran with tears down her cheeks, foreshadowed her decay. Tammy Faye's skin hung off her cheekbones.

I saw defiance and a Christlike countercultural challenge behind her eyelashes. She lived publicly, and she died publicly. Tammy Faye was unafraid to show us the ravages of cancer and remind us of the decay that was brought into the world through sin. Tammy Faye reminded us that dignity comes from the character we display in the circumstances God allows for us, whether withered by cancer or in the peak of health.

After her televised farewell, how she died became as much a part of her story as her PTL days. I was proud to call her a sister in Christ.

Only a century ago, public deaths like Tammy Faye's were common. "In the early 20th century, it was not always easy to defend the bedroom of the dying from awkward expressions of sympathy, indiscreet curiosity, and all the other persistent manifestations of the idea of the public death," writes Philippe Aries in The Hour of Death, a survey of Western attitudes toward death over the last thousand years.

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