Am I Still a Pentecostal?

I have been a Pentecostal minister for 25 years.  But that could be the most mis-leading statement I could say about myself.  Hence this blog.  Today I am making available Towards a Pentecostal Spiritual Theology: Some Key Issues on the Table.  It is an unpublished piece, rather wordy and dense, originally designed for a theological symposium.  You may or may not be interested in it’s substance but it will show you the weight of my intellectual struggle with Pentecostalism over these past years.

My thinking along this line began some six or seven years ago as I was wrestling with two key mid-life issues: whether or not I was a pastor, and whether or not I was a Pentecostal.  I have since resolved both — sort of.

I have come to own the fact that I am a pastor.  I mean this in the sense of being a person of word and prayer, a spiritual mentor and director, a teacher and a priest.  This is a life I love and treasure.  In my mind, to be a pastor is to accept the call to know God, to represent God to others as they search for clues and signs of his presence, and to help others know God for themselves.  To be a pastor is a clear and focused activity which has to be guarded.  My struggle, as I look back now, was to clarify the role and to resist the temptation to be a manager of the religious machinery we inevitably get tangled up in.  Pastors teach and pray, create contexts of worship and community, and live as “good infections” (CS Lewis).

But the other half of my struggle has not resolved in the same way.  I have not come back to Pentecostalism in the same way I have come back to being a pastor.  I have become too ecumenical, too aware of the broader and deeper theological ground of the church.  I resist the explanations for spirit-fullness that Pentecostals give, be-moan the shallow theology and message, and find myself out of sync with the Pentecostal culture and way of being.  Simply put, I have moved to a place where the name “Pentecostal” is completely inadequate for who I am and what I am about.  Over this past winter I seriously read and pondered whether or not I could make a full re-entry into the Pentecostal sphere.  The answer is that I could not.  There are parts of me that deeply appreciate what I have received from that form of the Christian faith, but after all is said and done, the shirt doesn’t fit anymore.

And yet…  and yet I am a supernaturalist Christian who believes that the mysteries and powers of the age to come are somehow at work among us now.  I hold to a Christian faith that values the more beyond our intellect and senses, a faith that seeks a living presence and not mere philosophy, a faith that is empowered by God himself and not simply self-management.  I am, in essence, a Christian supernaturalist, but with a different sense from my Pentecostal roots on how this works .  I want the baby without the bath water.  While “pentecostal” may have lost its usefulness to describe who I am, I am also asking: is there a better title?  Am I a “post-Pentecostal”?  Am I simply a Christian of the “radical middle”?  Is there a way forward?

In the course of this search I have given much thought to the explorations of the emerging church.  While there is much to appreciate there, I find the cynicism and experimentation of some in that movement very off-putting for me.  So I cannot say that I have yet identified with a group.  I listen to the emerging crowd and I listen to the wider theological-evangelical-liturgical-catholic-orthodox-christian voices that are out there.  I listen for clues as to what the Spirit is shaping and making in our day.  I wonder if what I am going through is symptomatic of a larger shift.

What are your thoughts on this?  Whether or not you are a Pentecostal, how are you doing fitting in with the form of faith you are presently attached to?  The attached paper notes some of the issues Pentecostal should face (there are more), but what other issues are at play for you?

Hope

I have been thinking about hope.  It is an essential component of what we often call the "theological virtues": faith, hope and love.  But while faith and love usually get the press, hope has my attention of late.  In fact, I have started a notebook with the simple title "Hope" and have been gathering thoughts as I read.

Hope is more wonderfully complex than mere "wishing".  For instance, what is the relationship of time and hope?  Is it possible to redeem what seems to us as lost in the past?  Is hope only for a better future?  Or can hope be applied to the history behind us?  What about the dead?  Is there hope for the dead?  Is there hope for the losers of history, those who seemingly  lost the battles of history not because they were wrong but because they were weak?  The beatitudes of Jesus would clearly suggest such a hope.

The postmodern is sometimes seen as an "end to endism", the rejection of notions of purpose and coherence in history.  But Christianity is the hope of the resurrection which means that all human experience is tied together — forgotten slaves and children who die young, the weak of voice and the plain of face, the small of intellect and those of meager means — in the final state, all will have an equal standing.  The loss of "history" in our time is precisely this loss of seeing the coherent whole of the human experience.  And as the dead seemingly no longer have a voice with us (to our loss), we too find ourselves quickly becoming irrelevant, as weightless and meaningless to life as we have considered our ancestors.  In this state of historical amnesia we become hopeless, because we see no real way to redeem what is broken in us, no way to fix the past that is always with us.  We take on an "unbearable lightness of being" because we are flighty and trendy, without connection to the big, long story we are part of.  But there is a way to regain our hope.  We have to turn again to the whole long story, to history, to purpose and meaning in history, to the weight of the past and the voice of our fathers and mothers.  We have to recapture what Scripture really is for us, this sense of coherence in the whole long story of the human journey, this sense that God is present to every moment and every person in every moment.  We have to reject the ideas that "history is bunk" (Henry Ford), or that history is ended (Francis Fukuyama).  We have to relearn what it means to hope in the way that the Bible calls us to hope, a hope that extends to the redemption of the past as much as the future.

Biblical hope will require a shift in our perspective on time.  Most of us do not have a theory of time; we simply feel time in the way present moments rush upon us, collecting into an unfixable past.  What’s done is done, we say. In this view there is no way to heal or straighten our history, no way to explain or understand, be present or love better because the past is lost to us.  But a messianic view of time sees the possibility of an in-breaking in time which changes the nature of time itself.  In the Biblical view of time, the past can be re-opened because the dead are raised; the past is brought to life in the forever present, and we are finally healed.  This is a redemption that is not a mere evolution of process but a transcendent gift, a sudden change in the landscape of our experience.

I believe that hope is connected to this messianic view of time.  This view of time cultivates our hope because it deals with the whole, past and future, and leaves nothing marked off as beyond transformation.  A messianic view of time hopes in the possibility that there can be a radical realization of our deepest desires, desires that we have felt in history but never fully realized — love and honor, justice and knowledge, joy and peace.  A messianic view of time breaks us out into a new world of uncharted experience, beyond the possibilities that inhere in our closed systems of cause and effect.  In this view of things, our hopes are not just our horizon but what lies beyond our horizon.  Our hope is not in what we can see but what we cannot see and yet still wait for.  This is a messianic hope and something I live for everyday.

A little confession: this has not be the easiest of seasons for me.  But I want to be a person of hope and I encourage you to join me.  It is the way the people of Jesus are called to live (Romans 5:1-11)