PneumaReview.com had the opportunity to speak with two scholars about this move of God, each of them giving an interview. The first of these interviews was with Dr. Paul Palma. He has written a significant book called Italian American Pentecostalism and the Struggle for Religious Identity, published in August 2019. In this book, he has written about the Italian Pentecostal Movement in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The second interview is with Dr. Michael Brown. It may be a surprise to some but an Italian Pentecostal Church played an important role in his spiritual journey. We trust that you will find these interviews informative and inspiring.

PneumaReview.com: You were born into a Jewish family. How did you happen to go into an Italian Pentecostal Church?

Michael Brown: Because I was not a religious Jew, I got caught up in the whole counterculture revolution of the 1960s, playing drums in a rock band and becoming a heavy drug user. My two best friends and fellow bandmembers (and drug users) liked two girls whose uncle was an Italian Pentecostal pastor and whose dad had been praying for them for years.

When the girls started attending services there, my friends went with them, first just to hang out, then because the church fascinated them, both because it was Pentecostal and because the pastor was teaching about the end times. When my friends started to change, I went to the church in August 1971, to pull them out. I was sixteen at the time, and, as they say, the rest is history.

PneumaReview.com: How were you received by the people there?

It made such an impression on me that I said to my friends, “Fine, if this is the direction you want to go, I won’t fight you over it.”

As would be expected from a Christian musician who combines depth of experience with theological training, Michael Card balances devotional and scholarly insights. Motivated by his experiences among African American churches and their moving tendency to address Jesus as Master, Card uses both personal anecdotes and stories from the history of American slavery as a lens through which to take the reader on a journey through the old and new testament worlds of slavery, and particularly to draw out the new testament theme of Christian life being deliverance from one slavery, that of the world, into the freedom that comes only from setting apart Jesus as a new Master. The book is divided into three main parts, each of which engages the reader at the level of the imagination to allow stories of African American slavery to help illuminate Biblical contexts. The first and shortest articulates the beginning of Card’s aforementioned journey, namely among African American communities, and the inspiration from the early church that, in the words of Ignatius, a ‘better freedom’ comes only through setting apart Christ as Lord. He also describes something of the three contexts of Old Testament, New Testament and African American slavery. The first is dealt with somewhat swiftly (and one suspects potentially idealistically) and is not really mentioned after this brief treatment. The latter two he sees as similarly brutal and demeaning, and it is the New Testament witness, illustrated with African American stories, that he focuses on in the rest of the book.

The second, much lengthier, part of the book deals with the life and teaching of the apostle Paul and his emphasis on Christian discipleship as characterised by being a ‘slave of Christ’. Card’s focus on the theme is illuminating and the reader is struck by the sheer extent of such teaching and references to slavery throughout Paul’s life and writings. Of particular note is his insight that the Pauline words used to describe three of the greatest gifts of grace, namely justification, redemption and reconciliation, all come to us from the world of slavery. Being a slave of Christ, however, is not like the slavery to the world that oppresses people in captivity, but Christian disciples are freed from such an old life and freed to a discipleship that involves pleasing our Master, healing divisions through our common identity, and a life of service. Card admirably does not shy away from difficult questions and points out that although Paul was not ostensibly an abolitionist, this was because his main emphasis was that all Christians, slave or free, were to find their identity not in their literal freedom, or lack of it, but rather in their common identity of having Jesus as Master. Nevertheless, if they could, they should take their opportunity for freedom.

Marshall Shelley and Eric Reed, “Finding the Grace Gates: An interview with Pastor Joseph Garlington” Leadership (Spring 1999), pages 22-28.

Pastor Garlington is the pastor of Covenant Church of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and a frequent speaker and worship leader at Promise Keeper events nationwide. “Finding the Grace Gates” focuses on the role of pastors as the “lead worshiper” of their congregations. Pastor Garlington relates many personal stories and experiences in explaining how to help people recognize holy moments (what Garlington calls “God moments”) in worship. He expounds on the term repristination, a word borrowed from the writings of Garry Wills, as he explains how worship must be renewed for every generation for them to properly understand its meaning. The role of the lead worshiper, he says, is “to lead by example”, and to “…not get in the way.” The key is leading people into an awareness of God’s presence and then teaching them to linger in it. Garlington stresses the importance of teaching people to find “grace gates”. “When I am most conscious of my inadequacy, my dependence upon God, and upon His sufficiency, that’s when I have a ‘grace gate’—the inrush of the grace of God for me for a particular reason, a particular season in my life… . My responsibility as lead worshiper is to help my congregation find the gate. You get a thousand people in a room and there’s somebody out there who has broken the law. And there’s somebody else who’s had the best week ever, and there’s everything in between. I have to get these people to understand that they all have access to the presence of God.”

Finding the Grace Gates provides many keen insights for anyone who leads worship or is interested in deepening their knowledge of Scriptural worship methods.

Reviewed by Joseph Joslin

Read the original article: www.ctlibrary.com/le/1999/spring/9l2022.html