Emerging Pentecostal

This writer has taken a bit of a break from contributing to EP, brought on primarily by fatigue over promoting the Church Basement Roadshow (my review here… go watch it in your neighborhood!) as well as a celebration-rich end of June: my wedding anniversary and my son’s birthday fall within a day of each other.

While I’ve been away from the laptop in this capacity, however, there seems to be no love lost for conversation about the intermarriage of pentecostal expression and the emerging church as a mood within Christianity as a whole.  While skepticism may still be the default response within emerging church circles to charismatic movements like the Assemblies of God, there continues to be a palpable interest on both sides of the proverbial fence about the role of the Holy Spirit in the life of a person or community breaking free from established forms.  Having met people from liberal, moderate and conservative camps, this inclination toward a genuine responsiveness to the Spirit seems to be a common thread, one I am confident can hold us together as we emerge as a meta-community into the new century, and into a more integrated followership of Jesus.

The most recent sign of a pentecostal renaissance within the emerging church, or vice-versa, is an invitation I received to participate in Azuza Remixed, described by its’ editor Brian LePort as ” a group blog dedicated to pentecostal theology, praxis, and history.”  I will be representing the emerging church stream in this conversation, and truly hope I’m not exposed as a two-bit hack in the company of the intellectual giants who are also contributing.  The blog launches on July 14, and I encourage you to check it out.

In the meantime, enjoy some Horshack.

George Wood over at AG Think Tank recently posted AGUSA Superintendent George O. Wood’s “Scriptural Guidelines for Assessing Revival.” I am personally encouraged that the guidelines are Christ-centric in nature and generous in scope - no absolute directives or narrowly-constructed diagnoses for true revival to be found there (as opposed to the AG’s statement of fundamental truths, which prescribe exact evidences for the baptism in the Holy Spirit).

There was one parenthetical note, however, a quote by former Supt. Zimmerman, which reflect a perspective of Scripture I find interesting when compared to the general tone of the scriptural guidelines:

Our former general superintendent, Thomas F. Zimmerman, once compared the Holy Spirit to a mighty river, and the Scriptures to the banks of that river. Brother Zimmerman said that great harm occurs when the river overruns the banks, but that the river does great good when it stays within the banks.

Thus, it is well for us to look at the safeguards the Bible provides in helping us “test everything.”

While I maintain a confidence in scripture to be, in the words of another fundamental truth, the “revelation of God to man, the infallible, authoritative rule of faith and conduct,” I feel that treating scripture as a mere boundary-marking tool sells it far too short in its’ dynamic and beautiful role in the life of the church (and the church in the world, for that matter). To run with the river metaphor, we should keep in mind that in ancient Mesopotamia the river overran its’ banks frequently, thereby setting the conditions for ancient Egyptian civilizations to flourish for generations. Indeed, treating rivers as neatly contained channels of water seems like a modern and industrial idea; and may shed some light on our perspective of Scripture as well. It’s a thoroughly modern convention to treat Hebrew and Christian scripture solely as a series of chapters and verses, proof texts and regulations. Of course, these aspects are to be found, but to relegate the entire narrative of God’s work in the world to guidelines and instructions would be the same as missing the forest for the trees.

This is not a challenge to Dr. Wood’s guidelines, by any means. It is rather a challenge to re-assess the lens through which we appreciate the role of the Bible in our relationship with God and people.

Welcome to a Christianity still forming, a faith that is compelling and beautiful and filled with hope, a God who is not remote and difficult to appease but one who is “down and in,” present and active in a our lives and world. Welcome to A Christianity Worth Believing, Described by author Doug Pagitt in his subtitle as a “hope-filled, open-armed, alive-and-well faith for the left out, left behind and let down in us all.”. The reader won’t find any gaseous, empty platitudes in this memoir of his living faith in Jesus, however; it’s instead a brisk walk through his story of seeking, finding, questioning, challenging, and refining what it means to follow Jesus in the world.

Like Doug and so many others who encountered Evangelical Christianity as a teenager, I found myself eventually struggling to follow the Jesus I fell in love with through all the hoops, twists, turns and cultural baggage that are embedded in our gospel presentations with so much fervency and certainty. Unlike Doug, I chose the path of least resistance and simply bought in and went with the program-as-offered. Reading A Christianity Worth Believing did, in a way, bring me full-circle in my own journey of spiritual reformation. With vulnerability, passion, and tremendous insight, Doug Pagitt has testified to a Christianity that is truly worth believing in.

Ecumenical! Evangelical! E-E-E.

To become the best version of myself really isn’t the goal here. Instead, this is the dance of reclaiming some beautiful language now saddled with so much cultural baggage while discovering new connections for those same words, reinventing as a way of giving new life to old forms. Someday very soon, we’ll find that emerging or emergent doesn’t really mean what we thought it meant when we were so proud to be associated with the term. Even now, with the sapling East Bay Emergent Cohort (EBEC?) I’m having second thoughts about that “e” word. If anything, it’s useful for sending out bat signal to people who are mostly curious about something they don’t really understand, or for those who have already crossed the proverbial line into post-Christendom, an opportunity to deftly express the myriad reasons the emergent coat no longer fits.

So the artist takes
these relics of ideology
out of the bargain bin,
dusts them off with some spit and shine,
and saves them for future use
in a mosaic that he hopes will hit
a solid note of resonance
with what the Spirit of the Holy is doing
here and now,
in this moment and on this soil,
through the millions of miles of
double-helix strands of protein
exploding through the generations,
and the layers of meaning that
color my vision
and frame my world.
Can I paint new pictures
With this threadbare brush?
What if I called myself
Ecumenical
Evangelical
or (gasp and hold your breath for this part)
Christian?
Whose resolve will go the distance -
Yours to limit the definition,
Or mine to break the ceiling it has known?

Join Doug Pagitt, Mark Scandrette and Tony Jones live in Oakland on June 20 and 21.
Learn more at http://www.churchbasementroadshow.com

9 God down and In from Ben Myrick on Vimeo.

I started reading this book on a pilgrimage in search of my own soul.
The author handed me a copy of Soul Graffiti on my way out his front door: I had written Mark an e-mail several weeks prior asking for a copy, and I was pleasantly surprised to get a response. Now having met Mark Scandrette and his ragamuffin crew in San Francisco, and after reading the book, his generosity makes perfect sense.

Soul Graffiti embodies a lived-out following of Jesus that will gain traction in the heart and mind of any spiritually hungry person who wants to move beyond flowery rhetoric and cerebral summersaults into the gritty realm of love, grace and renewal. This book is important, not just because of what Mark is saying but the way in which he conveys the message. Reader beware: Mark’s poetry and prose bleeds from his soul onto the page, and just as easily stains the worldview of the open-minded. If you are tired of religious cliche, if you want to learn what it means to abandon narrowly framed gospels about Jesus and embrace the Gospel of Jesus, if you want to get your hands dirty in the great experiment of following the Jesus Way, Soul Graffiti is an important stop on the route and will assuredly propel you even further than you had previously imagined.

Mark Scandrette is one of three authors who will be on the Church Basement Roadshow this summer. Visit the website, www.churchbasementroadshow.com, for tour dates and information.

the new EP is on technorati, so be sure to add it to your favorites and link to EP from your blogs and websites. My goal with this blog is to connect people within the pentecostal tribe to the larger emerging church conversation, and if a technorati rating helps us get located by the people who are seeking, hey-ya.

In the meantime, keep checking back at http://emergingpentecostal.org for developments and conversation points.

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact: Tony Jones, 612-597-0441

jonestony@gmail.com

Emergent Church Leaders Tour the Country in an RV with a Rollicking 21st Century Roadshow Revival of that Old Time Religion

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In celebration of Pentecost, this blog conversation has moved to its’ own home on the internet.  Please make a note of it, and tell all your friends (and enemies)!

http://emergingpentecostal.org

In the town where I was growing up, there was a gritty, goth-flavored coffee shop on the main drag named In the Company of Wolves Cafe. Having been brought up right in the conservative evangelical tradition, I was careful to steer clear of the pierced, tattooed, androgynous X-ers who frequented that little patch of sidewalk, choosing instead to cross to the other side and hope to God I wouldn’t be taunted or teased for my religiosity. If that were to happen, I would have to defend my pride faith using whatever tools had been handed down to me by the God Police; to prove both the rightness of my religious persuasion, and the velocity with which they, on the other hand, were hurtling toward hell.

The cafe has since lost its’ lease in the larger scheme to gentrify the neighborhood by pushing in franchise productions. It was replaced by a high-end antique store and a St.Arbucks popped up magically across the street. What was lost, however, was not merely a hip, independent coffee house to the inevitability of big business. On a different, more personal level, I lost the freedom inherent in discovering the raw, untamed love of a Creator-God, the beauty of truly believing that he will remain within me as I remain within him in a powerful and present way. I lost my religion to the cultural apprehension and insecurity of an American brand of Christianity that didn’t really know what to do with the street-level manifestations of a philosophical postmodern shift. Not knowing what to do, we tend to either shame the behavior of what threatens our way of life (i.e., bohemians, democrats, queer people, etc.) or shore up the credibility of our own position by circling the wagons (i.e., position statements, manifestos, articles of belief that move beyond Jesus and even Paul and into the minutiae of life - a new law to replace a messy, grace-filled spirituality).

We culturally-insecure Christians do this all the time, this getting out of rhythm with the Holy Spirit, both personally and institutionally. Here’s a key example: in his response to the recently-published Evangelical Manifesto, James Smith points out that even the idea of a manifesto is likely a thinly-guised attempt to frame evangelicalism from a uniquely American perspective.

When the world finally reaches a tipping point at which the export of American Cultural Evangelicalism no longer carries controlling interest in the narrative of Christ’s Body (I think that time has already come, by the way), how will followers of Jesus here in the US respond? Will we be wolves, or doves?

I found out later on, after the cafe had closed, that it was run by a loving Christian couple who wanted to provide a safe haven for the social misfits who, for whatever reason, didn’t fit in. Looking back, I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t have been welcome at my youth group (and that’s not a knock on my youth pastor, but on the social currents of cultural Christianity). I’m also pretty sure that, while I walked by that cafe from across the street, holding my breath, Jesus was inside, sharing a quadruple espresso with a mohawk-wearing punk, loving him and talking about the Way.