Watch for the book mentioned in this article. There is such a thing as a text for Pentecostal Theology after all!

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The StarPhoenix
10 Mar 2007

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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

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Max Depree in his bestselling book, Leadership Is an Art, says that the first job of a leader is to define reality. The last job is to say thank you. In between they serve their people.

Napoleon Bonaparte is quoted as saying that “leaders are dealers in hope.”

Last night’s address on the fifth anniversary of 9/11 , President Bush gave us an excellent demonstration in these two leadership principles.

First, he defined reality. “This struggle has been called a clash of civilizations. In truth, it is a struggle for civilization. We are fighting to maintain the way of life enjoyed by free nations. And we're fighting for the possibility that good and decent people across the Middle East can raise up societies based on freedom and tolerance and personal dignity.”

Second, he offered hope. “We look to the day when moms and dads throughout the Middle East see a future of hope and opportunity for their children. And when that good day comes, the clouds of war will part, the appeal of radicalism will decline, and we will leave our children with a better and safer world.”

Reality and hope go hand in hand. There is the present reality. There is a future hope that things will get better. This is the stuff of leadership.

Yet, many people will disagree with President Bush’s version of reality and the hope he offers. In Canada, a recent poll found that a majority of Canadians think the United States is to blame for the attacks.  One out of five Canadians think the  attacks were actually carried out covertly by the US government in order to provide an excuse to go to war with Iraq for access to oil resources.

A Canadian viewer commenting on the documentary “Loose Change” broadcast on CBC News: last Sunday states,

“How any rational person looking at the physical evidence and having at least a fundamental knowledge of physics can still believe the governments version is quite clearly incapable of seeing reality. I believe completely and without any reservation whatsoever that the US government murdered all those who died in the crimes committed on 9/11.”

9/11 Conspiracy theories are so prevalent on the internet that the magazine Popular Mechanics has published a book. Debunking 9/11 Myths: Why Conspiracy Theories Can't Stand Up to the Facts: The Editors of Popular Mechanics, John McCain, David Dunbar, Brad Reagan

Despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary many people continue to believe the conspiracy theories. Why?

People prefer a version of reality that provides a better hope. Branislaw Malinowski, an anthropologist and professional skeptic stated in Magic, Science and Religion and Other Essays. "Science is founded on the conviction that experience, effort, and reason are valid; magic on the belief that hope cannot fail nor desire deceive."

The facts of 9/11 tell a dreadful story. Islamic terrorists hijack airplanes and murder thousands of innocent people. There is little hope in that story.

Bush oversees a secret plot to precipitate a war against Iraq starting with the World Trade Centre demolition. It is still a gloomy story but at least we know that in the US democracy Bush’s term of office comes to an end in 2008. There is hope a new President will not act so rashly.

Writer Gore Vidal once said, “It is the spirit of the age to believe that any fact, no matter how suspect, is superior to any imaginative exercise, no matter how true”  However, in today’s Postmodern world, facts are not what they used to be. Feelings are the dominant criteria for judging the believability of assertions. If facts do not fit your version of the story then they get jettisoned. If somebody 'feels' an alternative version based on a different set of facts is more hopeful, their spin on the story becomes more believable. Especially if their spin supposedly unmasks the hidden agenda behind the official version of the story.  This is what the conspiracy theorist are so good at exploiting – the general cultural suspicions of truth claims.

As Tom Wright states in his audio series Christian Hope in a Postmodern World,

Facts are not important, spin is everything. And every country of every locality can produce examples of this. Reality is no longer divided into facts and values, or truths of reason and truths of science; it’s whatever you make it.  You invent it as you go along, choose your value, choose your spin and the story will follow.  Too bad if unenlightened readers think you’re simply telling them the facts. So this is one of the main features of post modernity, that reality seems to be in a state of collapse, we don’t know about the world out there, we only know about the inside of our own heads.

So if reality is what ever you make it to be and you want to manipulate people with the hope for a better reality than you can do that in today's world through political spin.

The problem is that people are also suspicious of people who make truth claims. As Wright observes, “All truth claims are made by someone or some group, and all persons and groups have agendas.” These agendas are smoked out by the postmodern skeptics. They are in it for the money, or for the sex or for the power.

As the conspiracy theorist argument goes, George Bush is a person with an agenda. He seeks power to dominate the world. Therefore his assertions about reality and his statements on a future hope are suspect.

The critical eye that is cast towards President Bush is also cast towards the Church. The Church makes assertions about its version of reality. It has a claim to knowing the truth. It has an agenda for converting people. It seeks influence and control in society. Therefore, in the postmodern culture, its claims are suspect until proven.

As my pastor once said, “The Church must hold ...   more »