The Jewish Centaur: Adventures in Pentecostal Spirituality

The Jewish Centaur

Adventures in Pentecostal Spirituality

Joshua Rice

THE JEWISH CENTAUR

Adventures in Pentecostal Spirituality

Copyright © 2015 Joshua Rice. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

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ISBN 13: 978-1-62564-624-8

EISBN 13: 978-1-4982-7355-8

Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Rice, Joshua

The Jewish centaur : adventures in pentecostal spirituality / Joshua Rice.

x + 122 p. ; 23 cm. Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 13: 978-1-62564-624-8

1. Rice, Joshua. 2. Spiritual biography. I. Title.

PS3604.O434 R53 2015

Manufactured in the U.S.A. 01/19/2016

Table of Contents

Title Page

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1: The Jewish Centaur

Chapter 2: The Holy Spirit

Chapter 3: Holiness

Chapter 4: Authority

Chapter 5: Culture

Chapter 6: Preaching

Chapter 7: Liturgy

Chapter 8: Revival

Chapter 9: Tongues

Chapter 10: Salvation

Chapter 11: The Bible

Chapter 12: Evangelism

Chapter 13: Relevance

Chapter 14: Mystery

Chapter 15: Theology

Chapter 16: The End Times

Chapter 17: Community

Bibliography

For my mother

Acknowledgments

There are several individuals and institutions who deserve personal gratitude for playing a role in the contents of this memoir. To the faculty of Lee University and Pentecostal Theological Seminary, especially Rickie Moore, Chris Thomas, Cheryl Johns, Sang Ehil Han, and Lee Roy Martin, thank you for introducing me to a Pentecostal theology worth falling in love with. Knowing all of you is like being a seminarian all over again—a feeling I have attempted to recapture in these pages. Likewise, to my friends at Columbia Theological Seminary and the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, I hope you will take this book’s banter as good fun. It is only because you gave me the space to explore my own story in the context of yours that these discoveries were possible.

On the ecclesiastical side, I would like to thank the wonderful members of my present parish—Mount Paran North Church of God in Marietta, Georgia. In the middle of the Bible belt of Baptist country, you remind me that Pentecostal practice and witness remain both relevant and meaningful to regular folks like us with bills and kids. I would especially like to express appreciation to Madeline Mulkey, hailing from our congregation but now a student at Wheaton College, for her lucid feedback and editorial work on the initial manuscript. I have no doubt she has a literary career waiting just round the bend.

I retain the most sacred honors for the members of my family who began forging our Pentecostal heritage long before such a lifestyle was at all fashionable. To my parents and my wife’s parents, thank you for raising us to believe that everything is spiritual. Turns out that you were right all along. To my grandparents, Dr. Gene and Betty Rice, we walk the trail that you blazed for our whole clan.

Finally, to Dr. Don Bowdle, who made me want to know God with every sinew of my mind, may you rest in peace.

Introduction

Snellville

Tired, blotchy, alive, her face. Hers is one of those faces you can’t imagine was ever younger; her cheeks are sunken, her skin has a grayish hue, the color of cadavers. Not quite elderly but beyond middle age, she has lived so much. She doesn’t smile, and her countenance suggests that inexpressible line between joy and fallenness—or someone who has discovered that perhaps the line doesn’t exist.

She is my first burning memory of church, in what was then a small town called Snellville just short of the North Georgia mountains. I don’t recall what brought her to the altar that night, just her walking back and forth for what seemed like an hour and praying out loud like she owned the place. She looked straight ahead while she prayed, like she was giving a stump speech, trying to convince God to vote the right way.

For that matter, the whole church at Snellville shouted at God like that, in an exuberant frenzy that was at the same time frightening and exhilarating. I don’t have any mental picture of the pastor preaching behind the pulpit, just him running up the aisle from the back to the front, microphone cocked to the side of his mouth, hollering like a Rebel soldier. In my memory he looked just like Mike Ditka, but perhaps this was a later mental association. Ditka later made me nervous.

My dad took me to Snellville because he was a denominational leader who visited various congregations in our state, and he tells me that I stood on the pews with my eyes wide like I did when he took me to see David Copperfield live. But David Copperfield was sophisticated and didn’t shout at the walls uncontrollably. I didn’t understand him or Snellville, but I liked him better. I knew he did tricks. It looked real, but it wasn’t.

At Snellville, however, the opposite was true. It looked like nonsense, but it was as real as pain. There was no other explanation for such chaos, and perhaps this is unknowingly what scared me—the fact that it couldn’t be as fake as I wanted it to be. For half my childhood, my dad threatened to take me back to Snellville. I didn’t think it was funny. I didn’t want to be like those people.

My second earliest memories of church were the annual camp meetings that our denomination sponsored. They took place just outside of Atlanta, but people came from all over the state. They were like Snellville on steroids, but I didn’t mind them as much. They say there is safety in numbers, so perhaps the couple of thousand people who showed up legitimated the experience for me.

The camp meetings were held in a concrete, open-air structure, built in the middle of a rustic campground. We called the slab with a roof The Tabernacle, after the tent of God’s presence in the book of Exodus. Only it wasn’t filled so much with the cloud of God’s glory as with dust and haze from the Georgia heat.

Camp meeting always took place in June or July when it was hot as all blazes, and the massive roof never could contain the overflow crowds, so they set up lawn chairs like a tailgate party on the grass outside. If it rained we just all crammed in, which made little difference in the syrupy humidity.

I remember my feet dangling off the metal folding chair as the camp meeting music climbed to its climax, changing keys when everyone expected yet bringing the crowd to its feet nonetheless. The preacher was hardly ever introduced. He worked straight from the musical crescendo to keep the train rolling toward the altar call at the end, which typically lasted longer than the sermon anyway, with the ministers huddling like football players and tarrying, which is another word for waiting around for something to happen. And if it didn’t happen that night, there wasn’t much to worry about. These things lasted a week or so, with three or four services a day. If you tarried long enough, you would get your blessing.

These are all good and pleasant memories, a museum full.

This was the church as I knew it and the only church I knew. When a fifth-grade classmate asked me my religion, I had no idea what to say beyond Christian, which is not what he meant. He wanted a denomination, and I had heard of them, but I wasn’t sure they were actually Christian. Us? We were Pentecostals. Was that a denomination?

Years later I realized that the terms weren’t mutually exclusive, and I had been a part of a Pentecostal denomination from birth: the aptly named Church of God. One of our early hymns, frequently sung when new members were received into a congregation, declared,

The Church of God is right.

Hallelujah to the Lamb!

We’ll soon be dressed in white.

Hallelujah to the Lamb!

I don’t imagine that I could sing that song with a straight face today, but there is more happening in those lines than sheer arrogance. There is one thing that is infinitely more absurd and unpractical than burning a man for his philosophy, G. K. Chesterton wrote. This is the habit of saying his philosophy does not matter.¹ The Church of God, like any successful anybody, thought our view of the universe mattered.

The stories of the Pentecostal church that I have to tell make us seem playful. But make no mistake, we didn’t show up to play, and we aren’t docile. We showed up to take over the world, and we are well on our way.

Near the turn of the twentieth century, when Pentecostal Christianity exploded onto the scene of American religion, there were a few thousand Pentecostals, derided and persecuted by most anyone paying attention, be they newspapers or other church groups. We continued to grow on the margins of society until we virtually owned them. Somehow, we Pentecostals seemed to find the wrong side of the tracks everywhere we went, and we found ways to right them. We started orphanages, literacy schools, agencies dedicated to the poor and destitute. But most of all, we started churches: small, exuberant, raw churches. Something in the veins of our movement seemed to spawn them like viruses. Fast-forward to today, and the Pentecostal virus has infected the entire world.

According to Dr. Harvey Cox at Harvard University, Pentecostal Christianity represents the fastest-growing faith movement that the world has ever seen. An authoritative study by the prestigious Pew Forum in 2011 confirms this picture. According to the latest research, there are now approximately six hundred million of us, comprising more than a quarter of Christendom. Leaving Christendom out of the stats, that’s almost one out of ten persons alive today identifying as Pentecostal! We have organized ourselves into more than seven hundred recognizable denominations, but the unorganized, nondenominational Pentecostal churches are as uncountable as the stars. We are incredibly diverse. As David Barrett describes global Pentecostalism,

Some

29

percent of all members worldwide are white,

71

percent are nonwhite. Members are more urban than rural, more female than male, more Third World (

66

percent) than Western, more impoverished (

87

percent) than affluent, more family-oriented than individualistic, and, on average, younger than eighteen.²

If you throw a stone into a sea of the world’s Pentecostals, you will most likely hit a poor woman from Africa before it ricochets to a laborer in the slums of Brazil. We are a people’s church, a poor man’s Spirit-religion.

Yet our strength is seen not only in the distinctiveness of our tribe. Our influence is equally seen in the virtual Pentecostalization of all kinds of Christian groups. Lots of Southern Baptists raise their hands in worship services now. Lots of Catholics speak in tongues (including the late Pope John Paul II!). Lots of Presbyterians pray for physical healings to occur. All of these supposed non-Pentecostals got all that from us.

Do you know a Pentecostal? If you do, you know that you do. We’re the ones who, with the zeal of Mormons on bicycles, do all we can to get you into our churches. We’re the ones who, if we do get you to church, scare you half to death by crying out in tongues in the middle of the hymn. We’re the ones who, if you mention you have a need in the grocery store, pray for you right on the spot. We’re the ones who pray quite loudly for you right on the spot if your need is of a physical nature. God may not be deaf, but we don’t think He’s shy, either. Like the good people of Snellville, we’ll shout at Him until something happens.

I hope you are reading for one of two reasons. Perhaps you are an interested outsider who wants to know more. I’m almost inclined to point you to other resources that cover all the introductory bases in an easy-to-read format: our theological tenets, our demographics, our history. But is any group of people defined, really defined, by Wikipedia? This is a book of stories, my stories, Pentecostal stories, dirty and randomized. Maybe it is the stories, not the statistics, that will tell you everything you need to know.

Or perhaps you are reading for the same reason that I am writing: you are a Pentecostal trying to come to grips with what it means to be Pentecostal. I have been on this journey my entire life, sometimes distancing myself from these roots, other times denying them, still other times cursing them like St. Peter at the fire of Christ’s trial. I have gazed upon the idols of modernity, trendiness, and stature. I have lusted after their wares. But when Pentecostalism is in your blood, there is no bloodletting. It’s more like an ethnicity than a religion.

This is a book about Pentecostalism: Pentecostal theology, spirituality, and practice. Mostly, it is a book about the Pentecostal church, because we Pentecostals never have had any sense of theology, spirituality, and practice outside the nitty-gritty realities of life together in the local church. It is not meant to be comprehensive; I leave the systematic work to the experts. But it is a book in which I try to capture those major pillars of Pentecostal expression through my own experience of Pentecostalism. In that sense, it is a memoir. But I expect that all writing, somewhere down the line, is essentially memoir.

A book about Pentecostalism would be irresponsible without including its dark sides. I assume that dark sides and blind spots are part and parcel of any