people (inside and outside of the church) have been asking that question for a long time. as a teen i never knew what to say when people would ask me about this. i remember telling them, "were a protestant church (though, not even sure what that meant) and, well, we're kind of like baptists." most people seemed to know what baptists were even though i really didn't know much about their church. i did know that the baptist church and our church had a lot of the same basic beliefs but mostly i knew they were more readily accepted by people than we were. this answer kept me from having to go into the "tongues" thing in the middle of parties or explain that, "no, we don't handle snakes or drink poison in our church."
it did make things weird, though, when i would bring a friend to church. i remember thinking (praying), "oh please don't let sister blue hair give her weekly message in tongues this week, oh please, oh please." of course, she always did. not that i didn't believe in what sister blue hair was doing it's just that my friends usually had no idea it was coming and i had no idea how to prepare them for it. how it would turn out, you never knew for sure. some of my friends freaked at what they heard and saw at our church and others said they were able to feel God for the first time in their lives.
as i think back over all my experience growing up in the pentecostal tradition i wonder how much of what we saw and did was simply cultural. i don't mean that our pneumatology in itself was cultural but maybe most of our expressions and our explanations and possibly even our means of engaging the Spirit were greatly influenced by the cultural and historical context from which pentecostalism was birthed.
as acts2 people we have had a tendency to try and recreate the circumstances of a move of God. whenever there is any kind of "outpouring" at a particular church we are a little too eager to build a model out of it and hold seminars about it and write a book about how it was "done." but even all of the more current moves of God seem to look amazingly like the azusa street revival meetings where it all began (there is even a group of folks meeting near asuza street who are praying for the same "fire" to fall as it did in 1906-1909) .
what i'm wondering is if our tendency to hold onto history (which is not bad in iteslf) is so closely tied to our way of seeking a move of God that we can't conceive of the Spirit causing people to act in any other way than what we have experienced. in other words, how much of the pentecostal church is simply cultural and how much of it is truly a reflection of the Spiritlife?
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maybe we do this with a lot of Christian traditions...not only pentacostolism. i know when i read the new testatment - the church in america seems strangely different from things i read.
well, that is the 2,000,000 dollar question...
I mean separating what is cultural baggage from what is authentically an expression of faith in Christ...
I guess it is finding where the most authentic expression of the Christian church is found we might begin to gather clues as to what Ancient Christianity looks like... finding some bench mark to evaluate the protestant (a modern reinterpretaion of The Church - ala late 15th century) expression of Christianity.
So where do we find such a bench mark? (Eastern Orthodox Church?)
pax
true, the pentecostal church is a product of modernity just like other traditions and so has most of the same struggles but what i think is unique is that it started out with a group of people who were viewed mostly as misfits and minorities in the culture and who had as a their highest core value to be missional and who were incredibly participatory and experiential. i suppose i'm suggesting that the budding pentecostal church had some strong postmodern characteristics but, alas, became very modernized in a short period of time.
in terms of a bench mark, i'm not sure where to look. certainly the eastern orhodox church has ancient roots and practices but is this church unaffected by culture albeit a more ancient one? i think the same question applies to them, how much of their church is simply cultural and how much of it is truly a reflection of the Christ life?
and that is a great question, how do we find an appropriate bench mark? is it even possible? are we only left with generalities to go on?
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