The StarPhoenix
10 Mar 2007
Ecstatic spirit of Pentecostalism gaining strength in Canada
CanWest News Service
OTTAWA — The first time Michael Wilkinson saw Pentecostals at worship, he was a teenager, dragged along by his parents. “These people are all crazy,” he came away thinking. “I’m not ever going back.”
But then the kids in the youth group asked him to some concerts. The music was terrific and the teens were fun, not losers or hopeless squares. “You can be cool and go to church,” he thought.
Now 41, he is both Pentecostal and associate professor of sociology specializing in Pentecostalism at Trinity Western University in Langley, B.C.
He maintains the Canadian Pentecostal Research Network and is compiling a study of Canadian Pentecostals, one of the first books of its kind. His colleagues are pressing him to finish so their graduate students can use it to undertake studies of their own.
Canada has about 4.4 million renewalists — some 500,000 classical Pentecostals, members of churches developed in the early 1900s; 2.5 million charismatics, people who are “spirit filled” but stay within their denomination; and about 1.3 million neocharismatics, or neo-Pentecostals, a movement that began 10 to 20 years ago among people who want to steer clear of some of the strictures of traditional churches.
Renewalists don’t all share the same beliefs or worship practices, but they are united by their experience of God — “an intense, direct and overwhelming spiritual experience centred in the Holy Spirit,” says Wilkinson, quoting from Frank Macchia’s Baptized in the Spirit: A Global Pentecostal Theology, one of several new books coming out on the subject.
The Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements says Pentecostal/charismatic Christianity is characterized by “exuberant worship; an emphasis on subjective religious experience and spiritual gifts; claims of supernatural miracles, signs and wonders — including a language of spirituality (as it is experienced), rather than a theology; and a mystical ‘life in the Spirit’ by which they daily live out the will of God.”
Psychology might describe it as magical thinking. Political science or sociology might see it as “enchantment,” a worldview that embraces wonder, belittled in western civilization but very much alive in other countries.
Renewal resides at the mystical end of the religious spectrum and much of it is an outright mystery, which is just fine with its adherents. For them, reason has its limits.
As one renewalist minister describes it, “When philosophers and theologians get to do enough thinking or talking, they eventually run themselves in a circle. . . . They’ve bumped their brains on the ceiling of a mystery, but don’t want to admit it, so they keep talking.”
Probably the most mysterious are the “gifts” of speaking in tongues, prophecy, deliverance and healing, and the signs and wonders, or modern-day miracles, “a foretaste of the coming kingdom of God,” according to Wilkinson.
Evangelicals are also turbo-charged in their worship but they believe the miracles in the Bible were intended simply to help the Apostles get the church started. Most don’t believe they are available to believers today. Pentecostals do.
Since Pentecostals take their name from a passage in the Bible in which the Holy Spirit imbues the apostles with special gifts and powers, their outlook is hardly surprising.
Tags: Pentecostalism, worship, Pentecostal, sociology, Canadian, renewal, charismatic, spirit+filled, Holy+Spirit, Christianity, supernatural, miracles, signs, wonders, tongues, healing, kingdom, God, Evangelicals
