Call for papers: Barth, pneumatology, and Pentecostalism

The call for papers is out for this year's Karl Barth Conference in Princeton. The theme is "Karl Barth's Pneumatology and the Global Pentecostal Movement." 

As we've come to expect from the conferences run by the Center for Barth Studies, the lineup is very impressive:

• Daniela Augustine (Lee University)
• Christian T. Collins Winn (Bethel University)
• Terry Cross (Lee University)
• Jessica DeCou (Princeton Theological Seminary)
• John Flett (Pilgrim Theological College)
• Darrell Guder (Princeton Theological Seminary)
• Michael McClymond (Saint Louis University)
• Frank Macchia (Vanguard University of Southern California)
• Paul Nimmo (University of Aberdeen)
• Nimi Wariboko (Boston University)
• Michael Welker (Heidelberg University)

You can see the call for papers here: http://barth.ptsem.edu/event/2016-annual-karl-barth-conference

Pentecostals are writing some mighty fine theology these days, but can they save Barth from his allegedly underdeveloped pneumatology?

Singing in the first person: on “I” and “we” in worship

Recently I went along with a friend to a Hillsong worship service. I was reminded again that one of the distinctive marks of Pentecostal worship isn’t just the style of music but also the prominence of the first person singular. In mainline Protestant worship, the prevailing trend has been to replace the worshipping “I” with the communal “we.” The “I believe” of the creed is changed to “we believe.” The newer hymns are all about “our” needs, “our” lives, “our” relationship to God and one another. When older choruses are sung, the pronouns are often updated to reflect the plural preference. I have been in a service where the deeply personal Geoff Bullock song, “The Power of Your Love,” was amended, from:

Lord, I come to You
Let my heart be changed, renewed
Flowing from the grace that I’ve found in You
And Lord I’ve come to know
The weaknesses I see in me
Will be stripped away
By the power of Your love.

To:

Lord, we come to You
Let our hearts be changed, renewed
Flowing from the grace that we found in You
And Lord we’ve come to know
The weaknesses we see in us
Will be stripped away
By the power of Your love.

Now in principle there’s nothing wrong with either “I” or “we” as far as singing to God is concerned. And the good Lord is probably long-suffering enough to figure out what we mean when we sing a line as daft as “the weaknesses we see in us.” Let’s face it, where hymnody is concerned, the Christian church will only be saved (if it is saved at all) as though through fire.

But I’m sceptical of the assumption that “we” is somehow the more Liturgically Correct word to use – as if the believers who turn up to church on Sunday morning cannot be trusted to remember that they are worshipping in a community. The whole thing smacks (if you’ll pardon the dirty language) of socialism. Are the clergy anxious to make us ever-mindful of our communal loyalties, as if they knew deep down that we would all rather be worshipping on our own at home?

Interestingly, St Augustine’s view of the worshipping “I” was exactly the opposite. In his exposition of Psalm 121, Augustine argued that the “I” is the proper symbol of corporate worship, while the “we” is too individualistic:

Let [the psalmist] sing from the heart of each one of you like a single person. Indeed, let each of you be this one person. Each one prays the psalm individually, but because you are all one in Christ, it is the voice of a single person that is heard in the psalm [Cum enim dicitis illud singuli, quia omnes unum estis in Christo, unus homo illud dicit]. That is why you do not say, ‘To you, Lord, have we lifted up our eyes,’ but ‘To you, Lord, I have lifted up my eyes.’ Certainly you must think of this as a prayer offered by each of you on his or her own account, but even more you should think of it as the prayer of the one person present throughout the whole world. (Expositions of the Psalms, 122.2).

Augustine’s point is that the language of “we” can easily give the impression that the congregation is a collection of atomistic individuals. But when believers sing to God in the first-person singular, it is as if the whole body of Christ were crying to God with one voice. The “I” is intensely personal: I sing as if the song applied to me alone. But it is also mystical and communal: beneath and above and around my own individual “I,” I hear the surge of a greater voice, a corporate “I” of which my own voice is a part. In Augustine’s view, this corporate voice is the voice of Christ. It is Christ himself who sings the psalms and who cries out to God in one voice from one body through the Spirit.

I implore you, my liberal Protestant comrades, don’t be too proud to admit that the Pentecostals might actually have got something right! And don’t be afraid to confront the question whether the experience of community in those ostensibly oh-so-individualistic Pentecostal churches is less intense and meaningful, or more, than what is found in our mainline churches with our theological propriety, our liturgical spit and polish, and all our earnest bluster and blather about we, us, and our.

On Pentecostal women (that is to say, ladies)

Anybody who was brought up, as I was, in the clamorous joy and madness of Pentecostalism, will know something that ought to have been obvious all along: that the Christian faith is really sustained not by its ecclesiastical hierarchies or its salaried religionists, but by its women.

One of the marks of Pentecostalism is the presence of strong women. You will find them in every Pentecostal church: praying in the spirit without ceasing; worshipping with solemn exuberance, as though they alone must bear vicariously the whole joy of salvation; interpreting their thumb-worn leather Bibles, which are always extensively underlined, annotated, and committed to memory; issuing swift, infallible, ruthlessly imposing moral judgments; and, through all this, patiently inscribing their own faith on the bodies of their children. (That, incidentally, explains the remarkable contrast in traditional Pentecostal gatherings between the uninhibited expressiveness of the women and the polite docility of their neatly dressed children.)

As a boy, I was often told that the most important person in our church was not the preacher or the musicians or even the swaggering itinerant evangelists who so often darkened our doors, but Mrs Loy, an 80-something (and later 90-something) Chinese woman who had devoted her life to prayer. In all the years I was there, I rarely heard Mrs Loy say anything, but every Sunday morning her tiny arthritic fists could be seen raised high in palsied worship, her little balding head shining with goodness and joy. Sometimes during worship she would deliver a message in tongues, and an awed silence would fall across the congregation like a blanket. To this day, I don't know what those tremulous glossolalic homilies meant, but instinctively I knew – as everyone knew – that they were the most important things ever spoken in our midst. Not because we understood them, but because they came from the heart of Mrs Loy. She was, I forgot to say, the pastor's mother.

Such women are the engine room of the church. To a great extent, even the formal power structures depend on their secret society, their prayers and prophecies and discerning of spirits. They exercise a tremendous social and theological power, even in churches where the official theology is repressive and the official power rests solely in the hands of men. All this is, as I said, explicit and transparent in Pentecostalism – but isn’t the same thing true in churches semper et ubique?

Here, perhaps, lies the explanation of a strange fact that has often puzzled me. Why is it that churches persistently refer not to women, but to ladies – the “ladies’ group”, the “ladies’ Bible study”, the “ladies’ morning tea”, and so on? As far as I can tell, the church is one of the only cultural institutions – another being the public restroom – that still favours this quaint terminology.

But truths lie buried in language. The word “lady” comes from the Old English hlaefdige (literally “bread kneader”), a woman of high status to whom one owes obedience – the wife of a lord for example, or the head of a household. In popular piety, the term was used to designate the Mother of God, “Our Lady”, the one to whom our homage is due (in Old English, the Latin domina is translated hlaefdige). Looking down from the cross, Christ calls his mother “woman” (Jn 19:26); when we address her, she is always “Lady”.

Is this, then, the reason for that curious ecclesiastical archaism, whereby women are addressed as “ladies”? Is this why an assembled group of women is convoked under the fearful nomination of “Ladies’ Group”? Is this the church’s subliminal recognition of where the real secret of its power lies – not in the young men with their furious ambitions or the old men with their weary dignities, but in the hlaefdige? For is this not the mark of the hlaefdige, the Lady, that she governs the whole household and makes every servant tremble, all the while indulgently allowing her husband the idle vanity of believing himself the sole lord and master of the manor? Is it any different in the church?

That’s why there is no greater comedy, nothing more rib-ticklingly ironic, no greater instance of institutional slapstickery, than a church (like the Pentecostal church where I grew up) that restricts positions of power to – of all people – the men!

A glorious wedding

We were recently discussing whether a Christian marriage ought to be sharply different from the usual ho-hum of wedding ceremonies. Well, here’s a wedding with a difference:



I don’t often experience pangs of nostalgia for my old Pentecostal days. But a clip like this brings back all the fond memories… Oh the glory!

Sighs, signs and significance

If you’re in the neighbourhood of Duke Divinity School next week, be sure to get along to the joint meeting of the Wesleyan Theological Society and the Society for Pentecostal Studies: Sighs, Signs, and Significance: Pentecostal and Wesleyan Explorations of Science and Creation, 13-15 March 2008. There’ll be plenary papers by Jürgen Moltmann, Harold Koenig, James K. A. Smith and Randy Maddox. And there are hundreds of other papers, with appearances from folk like Stanley Hauerwas, D. Stephen Long, William Abraham, Amos Yong, Joel Green, and Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen.

Encounters with tradition (4): from Pentecostal to Vineyard

A guest-post by Frank Emanuel

There is a saying in the Vineyard: you don’t join the Vineyard, you find out you always were Vineyard. This captures the sense of family that I experienced when I finally found my home in the Vineyard movement. The Vineyard began in the 70s in Los Angeles, California. In 1977, John and Carol Wimber, easily the most recognizable names from the Vineyard movement, had left their Quaker church to be part of the Vineyard movement within Calvary Chapel. Calvary Chapel was the denomination made famous for starting the Jesus People movement of the early 70s – images of thousands being baptized in the Pacific Ocean made the cover of Life magazine.

The Vineyard blends Pentecostal spirituality with conservative evangelical theology. Many of the early Vineyard leaders were associated with Fuller Seminary, a conservative evangelical institution. For me, and many others, the Vineyard represents the best of both worlds, bringing together the passion of the Pentecostals and the assuredness of the evangelicals.

I discovered the Vineyard during the early years of my pastoral career. I was interning at my second Foursquare Gospel church when my whole world was yanked out from under my feet. A number of factors led to this, many of which were my own doing. I was a young Christian, four years into ministry but without a lot of real life experience. I had become cocky and thought I knew how everything should be done. It was also around that time that I began to question some aspects of Pentecostal theology; this did not help my case any. I found myself thrown out of my ministry position, in a strange city far from my family. All but one of my friends went to that church, so I was alienated on that front as well.

I remember calling up the Toronto Airport Vineyard and asking if they had any home groups I could go to. I explained that I was technically on staff at a local church so I was unable to come Sundays, but that friends kept telling me I needed to find what they called a Kinship (home group). I was invited into one not far from my house in Clarkson.

I don’t think I will ever forget my first visit. It was nothing like I expected; the worship was wonderful and intimate (I was the primary worship leader in my own church), and the teaching was simple. What struck me was the prayer time; they asked me to sit on a chair and began to sing songs of the Father’s love over me. I spent a few months healing up at that Kinship until an opportunity came to head back to Ottawa.

I landed in Ottawa with the intention of making my way back to Nova Scotia. There was no Vineyard in Ottawa and I quickly realized that I didn’t want to fit into the Pentecostal church anymore. I was busking a bit to make ends meet when I met up with my friend Mike – through Mike, I ended up in a wonderful little Convention Baptist church. My time in the Convention was restorative. It was also the time to sort out my life a bit more. I went back to school and completed college. I met my wife to be and was made a lay minister in the church. Things were going well, but I was still restless inside. It soon became apparent that this church wanted me to pursue formal ministry, but I knew in my heart that I wasn’t a Baptist.

I left the Baptist church with a fiancé, a job as a college teacher, and new hope, since a Vineyard had just started up in Ottawa. It was especially exciting as the couple that pastored this Vineyard came from my hometown; they had pastored the Alliance church around the corner from the house I grew up in! It looked like everything was finally coming together.

That did not last long. The Vineyard I had left in Toronto had been experiencing wonderful renewal. But as a result, folks in Ottawa expected the new church simply to be an extension of the same renewal. Probably one of the biggest misconceptions about the Vineyard is the belief that we are hyper-charismatic; the reality is, we don’t focus on these things, but we don’t stop them when they happen either. Our focus is on being Christ to the world. Sometimes God shows up in amazing ways, but John Wimber always exhorted us to stick to the main and the plain of the gospel. All this made planting a new Vineyard really hard, and my fiancé was hurt in the process. So we left the Vineyard, even though this broke my heart.

We were married and three years later we both felt a clear call to go back to the Vineyard. Lots had changed, but coming back for me felt like coming home. We spent two years helping close down what was left of that congregation, and not long after we were released to start a new Vineyard, to build one from the ground up. That’s the church we’ve been planting. It’s very much a part of me; I long to give back some of what was so graciously given to me. This is why I am a Vineyardite.

Encounters with tradition (1): from Pentecostal to Anglican?

A guest-post by Aaron Ghiloni

I did not leave Pentecostalism because I had somewhere else to go. I wasn’t conscripted by the Catholics or pursued by the Presbyterians. I left because I had to. Theologically frustrated, spiritually dry and emotionally exhausted, I quietly bid farewell.

Like many Pentecostals, I was nurtured in revival. From birth, I was born-again on a weekly basis (if not more frequently). This was my life, my family’s life. Therefore, departing was incredibly difficult. If you’ve gone through this, you will know what I mean. It was obvious that I must leave – still, leaving was gruelling.

And so, I not only left holy-rolling and tongue-talking behind, but also good friends and a lifetime of memories. I had nowhere to go. I shook, sighed, and swayed. The vertigo of an ex-Pentecostal is ferocious. Since my Pentecostal days I have worshipped with a Baptist congregation, studied at an evangelical seminary, and been employed by various churches (non-denominational, Methodist, and now Anglican).

I have gone from Pentecostalism to – what? Officially, I’m Anglican, but unofficially I’m undecided. I’m denominationally ambivalent. It’s not that I frivolously bounce about like an excited toddler or a volatile teen, but that for the formerly-staunch Pentecostal, traditions and denominations are greatly relativised. One can have only one first love. Once a Pentecostal, always a Pentecostal (at least in some ways).

Being a part of this or that movement is no longer that important. And while for career purposes I may identify myself with a particular church, it is not because they have won my devotion. I simply cannot change the fact that my heart beat the hardest and my blood pumped the fastest at an old Pentecostal altar.

Aussie Pentecostal theology

Chris Tilling points us to a new Aussie blog entitled Pentecostal Discussions, which is aiming to offer serious, contemporary theological discussion from a Pentecostal perspective.

I myself was brought up in a Pentecostal church environment here in Australia; unfortunately, in my experience this environment tended to be characterised by a lack both of social conscience and of theological insight—so it’s encouraging to see the emergence of a new generation of Pentecostal theologians who are concerned to think sharply about their faith.

Whatever we might think of Pentecostalism, those of us in mainline traditions can learn some valuable things from our enthusiastic brethren. So be sure to keep an eye on Pentecostal Discussions.