In the updated version of The Third Force in Missions: A Pentecostal Contribution to Contemporary Mission Theology (Hendrickson Publishers, 2016), Paul A. Pomerville offers an amplified reiteration of the major premises of his earlier work (Hendrickson, 1985), namely, that Pentecostalism is enacting a biblical reading which challenges theologies skewed by the claims of dispensationalism on mission theory and praxis, and that indigenous Christianity of the Southern Hemisphere offers viable examples of authentic engagement with the Bible. In fact, that engagement is unhampered by Western assumptions that threaten to contradict inherent Southern sensibilities regarding the existence of the spiritual realm. In regard to the vigor of the contemporary Pentecostal missions phenomenon, Pomerville offers that setting the movement apart as distinctive is in order. Not only does Pentecostalism don well its appellation as “The Third Force” of Christian expression after Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, Pomerville posits the justification of the term “first force” in twenty-first century missions as a possible descriptor pointing to the undisputed vigor of Southern missions today. That “force” manifests an impressive record of strides made within and emanating from that zone out to the world—much of which has been underreported. Its efficacy is also found in its potential to engage sensitively with the growing Islamic population. Pomerville sees the church of the South, rather than the church of the North, as the hope for Islam.

Paul A. Pomerville

In other words, what Pomerville does this second time around is to point to the undeniable vigor of the Pentecostal phenomenon in the Southern Hemisphere, and coming out of the South these past 30 years, where the movement is producing a contagious and enduring transcultural spirituality. Also, this time Pomerville reflects not just on the dangers of dispensational theology in terms of major blind spots counterproductive to sound hermeneutics (i.e., a hollow eschatology and an anemic ontology of the kingdom of God). As well, his concern targets the dangers to the ongoing mission of the Christian church that lay couched in an abiding silence on the role of the Holy Spirit and a suspicion of the concept of revelation as a dynamic activity.

Reviewed by Anna M. Droll

Leah Payne speaks with PneumaReview.com about her book, Gender and Pentecostal Revivalism.

PneumaReview.com: For your book, Gender and Pentecostal Revivalism, why did you concentrate on the ministry of two revivalists?

Leah Payne, Gender and Pentecostal Revivalism: Making a Female Ministry in the Early Twentieth Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), xii+223 pages.
From the Publisher’s page: This innovative volume provides an interdisciplinary, theoretically innovative answer to an enduring question for Pentecostal/charismatic Christianities: how do women lead churches? This study fills this lacuna by examining the leadership and legacy of two architects of the Pentecostal movement – Maria Woodworth-Etter and Aimee Semple McPherson.

Leah Payne: I wanted to explore how gender (as well as race and class) shaped Pentecostal Revivalism over time, so I chose revivalists who were powerful and influential representatives of the first two generations of the movement. Maria Woodworth-Etter is an example of how Pentecostal revivalism originated in holiness revival circles and then morphed into its own distinct set of practices and theologies. A generation later, Aimee Semple McPherson represented a shift in Pentecostal revivalism from its rural, tent-revival practices into the middleclass mainstream of American evangelicalism. Both revivalists toured extensively, wrote prolifically, pastored mega-churches, had many imitators, and used mass media to distribute their messages. Thus, they are ideal subjects to study the formation and reformation of the movement over the years.

PneumaReview.com: How would you introduce Maria Woodworth-Etter and Aimee Semple McPherson to someone who is not familiar with their stories?

Leah Payne: Good question!  Woodworth-Etter and McPherson were two of the most influential and innovative revivalist ministers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Like a lot of powerful revivalists, they were famous for their preaching and infamous for their ministry careers and personal lives. Like a lot of celebrity pastors, they had sex and money scandals. What makes them especially interesting to me is that they created and maintained authority as celebrity ministers in an era when the categories of “woman” and “minister” were perceived to be discreet. How they negotiated those two identities, how and why Pentecostals accepted them, and how their careers shaped the movement is the focus of Gender and Pentecostal Revivalism.

PneumaReview.com: Others often refer to your two primary subjects as Sister Etter and Sister Aimee. Has it been a conscious decision to refer to these pioneers as Woodworth-Etter and McPherson instead?

Leah Payne: Most people (including many historians) refer to Woodworth-Etter and McPherson by their “churchy” names like Mother Etter or Sister McPherson. For example, Edith Blumhofer’s excellent biography of Aimee Semple McPherson, Aimee Semple McPherson: Everybody’s Sister does this in part to demonstrate the warmth and feelings of intimacy that McPherson evoked from her followers. I choose to refer to them the way academics & theologians typically refer to important thinkers/activists: by their last name. I do this because I want to give them credit for being architects of Pentecostal theology and practice. I want these women to be talked about alongside other important Pentecostal-Charismatic theologians and practitioners like Whitefield, Wesley, etc. Referring to them in this way is my way of recognizing their accomplishments.

Richard Mouw argues that today’s Mormons do not necessarily agree with the 1840 Snow couplet, “As man is, God once was. As God is, man may become.” Mouw, president emeritus of Fuller Theological Seminary, says that there has been “a decision on the part of the Mormon leadership to downplay the Snow couplet within the corpus of Mormon teachings about the deity, not just to outsiders, but within their own community. This suggests that contemporary Mormonism is interested in joining the broad Jewish and Christian consensus that God is ontologically different from man—or at least that Mormons today don’t want to directly contradict that consensus.”

Read the related review essay by Gerald McDermott, “Mormons and Christians: So Close, Yet So Far Away: What should we make of claims that the two faiths are on a path to reconciling?” Christianity Today (September 7, 2016).

Craig Keener, “Jesus’s miracles and other accounts” AqueductProject.org (May 20, 2016).

Craig Keener says this video interview about Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts may be the most concise and coherent he has given, with a focus on ancient background and philosophy.

Read exclusive excerpts from Miracles at PneumaReview.com.

John P. Lathrop, “A Principle of Pentecost” Women of Wonder (May 9, 2016).

Craig Keener, “Does doubting salvation make you unsaved?” CraigKeener.com (July 24, 2016)

New Testament scholar Craig Keener answers questions about what the Bible says about doubting our salvation in this short video. “The Bible doesn’t say that we are saved by confidence in ourselves, but by confidence in Jesus.”

Jennifer A. Miskov, “Confessions of a Facebook Addict” Silver to Gold (July 9, 2016).

Heidi Baker, “Chips and solar Bibles in the persecuted Church” IRIS Global (July 29, 2016).

Heidi Baker shares about the use of solar-powered Bibles and the effectiveness of distributing the Bible on MicroSD cards to the persecuted church.

Médine Keener, “7 Things Christians Should Know about Refugees” Seedbed.com (June 20, 2016).

Craig Keener, “Young teenagers who prophesy” CraigKeener.com (July 14, 2016).

A brief video teaching on Acts 21:9. “Nobody’s too young to serve God or be full of God’s power.”

Roger Olson, “An Evangelical Response to David Gushee’s RNS Essay ‘On LGBT Equality’” Patheos (August 26, 2016).

Christian theologian and professor Roger Olson responds and expands upon the August 22, 2016 Religion News Service essay, “On LGBT equality, middle ground is disappearing” by David Gushee. Olson asks, “Once the government forces religious organizations to become inclusive of LGBT people without hindrances or discriminatory rules (e.g., forbidding gay marriage among its employees and/or students) by withholding tax exemptions all non-profit organizations receive, what will happen next?” He then offers brief but grim predictions, and a reminder that Christians have faced much worse.

Jennifer LeClaire, “The Truth About Bethel’s Bill Johnson” Watchman on the Wall (August 26, 2016).

In this opinion essay appearing on her blog, hosted by CharismaNews.com, Charisma editor Jennifer LeClaire shares her reflections and seeks to set the record straight about Bill Johnson.

Read and respond to Pastor Larry Russi’s related review of Martyn Wendell Jones, “Kingdom Come in California?” Christianity Today (May 2016).

Craig Keener, “The wise and foolish virgins” CraigKeener.com (July 21, 2016).

A brief video teaching on Matthew 25:1-13.  “No matter how old or young we are, we always need to be watching and ready for the Lord.”

Scott Lencke, “Wait, Paul! Do You Want Us to Speak in Tongues or Not?” ProdigalThought.net (August 12, 2016).

With the intention of stirring up conversation on the biblical purpose of tongues, Scott Lencke wrote this article to get readers to rethink their approach and assumptions about glossolalia.

Alan Jacobs, “The Watchmen: What became of the Christian intellectuals?” Harper’s MAgazine (September 2016).

William De Arteaga writes: “This a is a long read, but also important to those of us wishing to make an impact on the secular world.”

Lee Dean, “The Financial Health of Pastors: New study points out key issues as churches seek long-term solutions” Church Law & Tax (September 2016).

“At any given moment, there are people in a church congregation who are in the grip of a financial crisis. One of those people could be the pastor.”

“WCC remembers Pentecostal ecumenist Walter J. Hollenweger” World Council of Churches (September 6, 2016).

“Rev. Dr Walter Jacob Hollenweger, a long-time professor of intercultural mission theology at Birmingham University in the UK and prolific author on the nature of the Pentecostal movement, died on 10 August in Krattigen, Switzerland.”

Stanley N. Gundry, “An Open Letter to the Members of the Evangelical Theological Society” Patheos (September 16, 2016).

Roger Olson has reproduced Stanley Gundry’s open letter to fellow ETS members about his concerns regarding introducing resolutions such as the recent four-fold statement on gender and marriage. He is responding to an apparent attempt to move the Society from having a doctrinal basis to having a precise and exclusive doctrinal statement.

The sixth in a series of 19 lectures on the Gospel of Matthew by Dr. Craig S. Keener of Asbury Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky. This lecture is entitled, “Matthew 3—4.”

For further reading:

Craig S. Keener, Gospel of Matthew: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary (Eerdmans, 2009).

The Secret Codes in Matthew: Examining Israel’s Messiah
A unique commentary on Matthew, the Gospel to the Hebrews, by Messianic teacher Kevin Williams.

Historian William De Arteaga introduces us to the beginning and early years of the Charismatic Movement, when Pentecostalism and the gifts of the Spirit publicly and dramatically entered into the mainline churches.

Previous articles in this series covered the origins of Pentecostalism, and the Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship International. Both groups played important roles in bringing the gifts of the Spirit into the Church as normal events. This article traces the history of the Charismatic Movement, when Pentecostalism and the gifts of the Spirit publicly and dramatically entered into the mainline churches. Many Spirit-filled believers today—Pentecostal, charismatic, or non-denominational—have no memory of how the Charismatic Movement began,^[1] but its history should not be forgotten.

The Coming of the Charismatic Renewal

By 1960, there were large numbers of mainline Christians in the United States who were “closet Pentecostals.” They received the Baptism of in the Spirit mostly from contact with such para-church groups as the Camps Furthest Out (CFO), the Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship International (FGBMFI), and Agnes Sanford’s Schools of Pastoral Care.[2] Others came into the fullness of the Spirit through direct prayer encounters with God, as in the case of Rufus Moseley[3]. Most had learned to be prudent in manifesting the gifts of the Spirit in their mainline churches lest they be thrown out, or ostracized as “weird.”

There was no specific name for that type of Spirit-filled believer – one who exercised the gifts of the Spirit but remained within a mainline congregation. Some of those who received the baptism of the Spirit during the 1930s to 1960 were ministers or pastors within the mainline churches, and this posed a special problem for them. They were often asked to resign their charges or leave their denominations if they persisted in their Pentecostal ways.

But some ministers were able to keep their positions in spite of their Pentecostalism. Among these was a Lutheran minister, Harald Bredesen, who had a long association the CFO. He had offered to resign his position after he received the Baptism of the Spirit, but his bishop refused to accept it. Then in 1957, the Rev Bredesen accepted the call as pastor of Mount Vernon Dutch Reformed Church in upper New York. That church soon became the focus of local charismatic activity and worship.^[4] A handful of other pastors succeeded in openly operating as Spirit-filled ministers within their denominations, among these were Fr. Richard Winkler (Episcopal, in Wheaton, Illinois) and the Rev. James Brown (Presbyterian in Parkesburg, Pennsylvania). All of this was low key and unnoticed on a national level. After the renewal became public in 1960, these men came into leadership positions of the general movement. For example, the Rev. Bredesen had a special anointing as a publicist. He seemed to be at the right place and time, and know the important media people. He was quoted and cited many times in the national press and was often on TV.

The fifth in a series of 19 lectures on the Gospel of Matthew by Dr. Craig S. Keener of Asbury Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky. This lecture is entitled, “Matthew 2—3.”

For further reading:

Craig S. Keener, Gospel of Matthew: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary (Eerdmans, 2009).

The Secret Codes in Matthew: Examining Israel’s Messiah
A unique commentary on Matthew, the Gospel to the Hebrews, by Messianic teacher Kevin Williams.

Daniel Ramírez, Migrating Faith: Pentecostalism in the United States and Mexico in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2015), xix + 283 pages.

Why should readers of The Pneuma Review look up these books under review? Although the answers to this question may seem obvious, they nevertheless need to be reiterated: because the center of Christianity has now shifted from the Euro-American West to the global South; consistent with the foregoing, because of the so-called “browning” of the North American church such that the its vitality is currently being sustained, and is projected to be increasingly carried over the next few decades, by migration from the rest of Latin America; and because, for the North American Pentecostal movement in general and the Assemblies of God denomination specifically, one third of all adherents are non-white and one-fourth – and growing percentage-wise as well as in aggregate – are Latino (see, e.g., Pew Research Center demographics from July 2015). Beyond other rationales that might motivate the present constituency, the above ought to prompt curiosity at least, if not a sense of urgency about becoming more acquainted with what Espinosa and Ramírez have to say. To be as pointed as possible: despite their “Decade of Harvest” initiative in the 1990s, the Assemblies of God would be in no less severe of a decline compared to mainline Protestant denominations if not for growth in Latinos within its ranks over the last two decades!

Gastón Espinosa is Arthur V. Stoughton Professor of Religious Studies at Claremont McKenna College.

The authors and their books covered in this review are quite distinct. Ramírez is a more recently established academic who is shifting, at the time of this writing, from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (their Department of American Culture and Latino/a Studies) to Claremont School of Theology (Claremont, California). This is his first book, his Duke University PhD thesis, which has been substantially revised and extended, appearing after almost a decade. Espinosa, meanwhile, began his scholarly work on the origins of Latino Pentecostalism in the first half of the twentieth century (completing his PhD on this topic in 1999 at the University of California, Santa Barbara) and has become renowned as one of the foremost specialists on Latino religions with more than a half dozen books from Oxford University Press, Harvard University Press, and other prestigious scholarly publishers. From his post at Claremont McKenna College, since 2009 as the Arthur V. Stoughton Professor of Religious Studies, Espinosa’s Latino Pentecostals in America builds on his research trajectory going back more than two decades, carrying forward to the present the more historically focused coverage of his preceding monograph, William J. Seymour and the Origins of Global Pentecostalism: A Biography and Documentary History (Duke University Press, 2014). Both have been participants at least in some respects of the histories they are narrating and thereby provide superb and complementary guidance to anyone interested in understanding further the Latino side of North American Pentecostal history.

The forth in a series of 19 lectures on the Gospel of Matthew by Dr. Craig S. Keener of Asbury Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky. This lecture is entitled, “Introduction to Matthew, Matthew 1.”

For further reading:

Craig S. Keener, Gospel of Matthew: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary (Eerdmans, 2009).

The Secret Codes in Matthew: Examining Israel’s Messiah
A unique commentary on Matthew, the Gospel to the Hebrews, by Messianic teacher Kevin Williams.

A devotional from Kirk Hunt’s book, Blessed and Blessing: Devotionals for Gospel Champions (CadreMen Press, 2015).

David’s First Anointing

Then the men of Judah came, and there they anointed David king over the house of Judah.
2 Samuel 2:4a NKJV

David’s second anointing came during a time of personal sorrow and national disunity. The men of Judah officially recognized David as their king. Benjamin, David’s own tribe, did not. All of the rest of Israel? Absent.

Still mourning the death of Saul and Jonathan, David took on the weight of his kingship. With tact, compassion and diplomacy, David sought to consolidate Israel under a single government. No small task.

The private anointing at 1 Samuel 16: 12-13 was necessary for David’s development. This second anointing publicly confirmed David as king. This anointing carried David from learner to leader.

Anointing is not a static, once-and-forever event in your life. As God moves you through His path and process, things change. You change. Your anointing changes.

As king, David’s sphere changed. No longer a mercenary captain, he became a regal king. He stopped working with the few and began working with the many. And this change did not end David’s story.

If you are one of God’s anointed, your story is not over. This season in your life is orchestrated by God. Your next season will be arranged by God as well. Your second anointing is another beginning, not an end.

Think:  

As I move through God’s plan, my anointing will change.

Pray:

“Lord, help me to fulfill Your call and anointing in my life.”

Blessed and Blessing, Devotionals for Gospel Champions

The Kingdom of God is built by the hands and hearts of Gospel Champions. These devotionals are focused on the faithful and courageous men and women who answer God’s call on their lives. Often the least recognized, these Christian servants are the hands, feet and face of God’s present-day Kingdom. Some of the devotions encourage servants to answer His call, then prepare for their mission tasks. Other devotionals address working with others on the frontlines of the Gospel mission. There are devotionals related to finishing in continuing strength and steady faith. Some devotions include Scriptural medicine and reassurance for those who stumble while serving. The servants who bless others are often more blessed than they know. These teachings help Gospel champions recognize and use the gifts God has already given to them. This book benefits the men and women who deliver God’s answers to the physical and spiritual needs around them.

This devotional from Kirk Hunt’s book, Blessed and Blessing: Devotionals for Gospel Champions (CadreMen Press, 2015), is reprinted here with permission. Copyright © by Kirk Hunt and CadreMen Press.

The third in a series of 19 lectures on the Gospel of Matthew by Dr. Craig S. Keener of Asbury Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky. This session is entitled, “Miracles, Part 2, Exorcism.”

For further reading:

Craig S. Keener, Gospel of Matthew: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary (Eerdmans, 2009).

The Secret Codes in Matthew: Examining Israel’s Messiah
A unique commentary on Matthew, the Gospel to the Hebrews, by Messianic teacher Kevin Williams.