Grant McClung, “Pentecostals: The Sequel: What will it take for this world phenomenon to stay vibrant for another 100 years?” Christianity Today (April 2006), pages 30-36.

While some of us who have been reading Christianity Today for years and years—I started in 1961 when the magazine was five years old—may not expect supportive articles on Pentecostal/charismatics, we have now seen several in the past few months. A recent issue featured a nice review on Jack Hayford, the current President of the Foursquare Gospel Church. The November 2005 issue featured Ted Haggard, the charismatic president of the National Association of Evangelicals.

CT’s April 2006 issue contains an article by one of Pentecostalism’s better historians, Grant McClung, who for years has been researching, teaching and writing about Los Angeles’ Azusa Street Outpouring of the Holy Spirit. This article was also timed to coincide with the Azusa Centennial held in Los Angeles.

Since there are now 600 million Pentecostal/charismatics across the world and, according to the article, another 54,000 are being added every day, it is hard for the Evangelical church and one of its finest periodicals to ignore all of us. In less than 20 years, at current rate of growth, there will be over one billion of us, mostly in Africa, Latin America and Asia. In many ways, we are the Evangelical movement. McClung notes that Pentecostals today are more urban than rural, more female than male, more majority world than western, more poor than affluent, more family oriented and more young than old.

McClung closes his article with seven prayers instead of predictions. “1. That we may keep Christ and his commission at the center.” “2. That we maintain the dual dynamics of Word (exegesis) and Spirit (experience) as necessary equipping for mission.” “3. That we lift up holiness of character and turn from the carnal display of human charisma.” “4. That we get the life-giving, socially transforming gospel of Jesus Christ out of our sanctuaries and into the streets.” “5. That we humble ourselves and acknowledge all partners in the harvest.” “6. That the Azusa Street centennial will not only be a cause for celebration, but also a time for solemn reflection.” “7. That we will be more excited about the glory of God than about our own accomplishments.”

I believe that we have to go back to our Pentecostal roots to appreciate what God has done in the past, and to wonder with awe what He will do in the next century. The early Pentecostals emphasized that “Jesus is coming soon.” I cannot help but wonder if that coming is a lot closer than we all realize—especially when 54,000 more people will be Pentecostal tonight instead of what they were this morning. In less than a month, everyone in my home state could be a Pentecostal.

James R. Goff Jr. and Grant Wacker, eds., Portraits of a Generation: Early Pentecostal Leaders (Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas Press, 2002), 430 pages.

The introduction to this book tells us that no real compelling interest existed in the 20 people whose lives are described therein for the first 50 years of the 20^th Century. These were people who had lived in the late 19^th and early 20^th Century and were on their way to being forgotten—they did not matter anymore, and may never have truly mattered until the church began to grow and grow world wide in the last half of the 20^th Century.

As most of you know, all kinds of interest and publication has followed this explosive growth. Why has it happened? Who started it and where and how? There has been much study on the more prominent leaders who became intertwined by what happened at Azusa Street in Los Angeles. However, until this book, many have remained unknown to most of Christendom. You might have heard of some of the people who are included in this book, but I doubt that you know them all. I did not know them all, and I have been a student of our movement for 40 years.

Contributors to this volume include many well-known Pentecostal/charismatic historians including Edith Blumhofer, Cecil M. Roebuck, Vinson Synan, and Gary McGee.

I learned much and I met some new personalities that I did not know. Portraits of a Generation is an excellent reference book that is written well and in an enjoyable style.

Reviewed by H. Murray Hohns

Grant Wacker, Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2001), 377 pages.

Readers of this journal tend to be inhabitants of the Pentecostal/charismatic movement, and are thus to some degree familiar with the theological terrain of the early Pentecostal movement. Pentecostals have not been, at least in the past, the best keepers of their own history. They have preferred to concentrate on evangelism and propagation in light of the “soon coming return of the King” (as I so often heard it expressed in my home church as a child) rather than wasting time on worldly things like records and oral histories. They did, however, leave a historical record in their printed justifications of their doctrine and doctrinal experiences. In recent years there have been a number of histories, pioneered by Edith Blumhofer and William Menzies among others, attempting to give an account of how Pentecostalism came to be. These accounts have tended to focus on the discovery of the theological distinctive of Spirit Baptism and how that distinctive survived and thrived.

Early Pentecostals defined themselves and were known to the outside world as those who “tarried” in the “upper room” until they had “prayed through” to the “baptism in the Holy Ghost and power.” But what were those believers like outside of the “upper room”? How did they manage to maintain the reality of their experience within the pressures of “real life”? It is this which has motivated Grant Wacker to crawl through the recycling bins of used bookstores and the shelves of archives and Bible colleges to retrieve this lost story. Wacker painstakingly excavates the world of these first Pentecostals because the “ideas, practices, and institutions they set in motion persisted long after their deaths and, to a great extent, continued to define Pentecostal patterns in America at the end of the twentieth century. From them later adherents learned what questions to ask of life and, perhaps more important, what questions not to ask.” (p.8) Wacker sifts through an enormous amount of evidence to allow us, eighty years later, to listen in on and observe the dynamic of the Pentecostal experience in the lives of these believers across the whole realm of human experience, from the upper room to the bedroom.

Heaven Below details the worldview and experience of life among early Pentecostals and the implications of Pentecostal belief in all areas of life, including some areas not previously focused on in standard Pentecostal histories: temperament, authority, rhetoric, customs, boundaries, nation and war, to name a few. All are examined in pursuit of establishing Wacker’s key premise for the book:

The genius of the pentecostal movement lay in its ability to hold two seemingly incompatible impulses in productive tension. I call the two impulses the primitive and the pragmatic…idealism versus realism, or principle versus practicality…Pentecostals’ distinctive understanding of the human encounter with the divine, which included both primitivist and pragmatic dimensions, enabled them to capture lightening in a bottle and, more important, to keep it there, decade after decade, without stilling the fire or cracking the vessel (p.10, author’s emphasis in italics).

The primitivist leaning of Pentecostalism is well documented; early Pentecostals (and many of their present day descendents within the Pentecostal and Charismatic tents) believed that by means of their baptism in the Holy Ghost they had bridged 18 centuries of institutional and experiential obstruction to direct contact with God, as had been experienced by the first believers in Christ on the day of Pentecost and after. But less known and, Wacker argues, less acknowledged has been Pentecostal pragmatism, the success that shows, “that at the end of the day pentecostals proved remarkably willing to work within the social and cultural expectations of the age. Again and again we see them holding their proverbial finger to the wind, calculating where they were, where they wanted to go and, above all, how to get there. That last instinct, the ability to figure the odds and react appropriately, made them pragmatists to the bone.” (p.13-14) Some may take this quote to mean that Wacker is accusing Pentecostals of being mere opportunists, who have naturally followed what works rather than what is right. In truth, some Pentecostals have been anointed more by the spirit of pragmatism than the Spirit of God—in larger truth, all believers in all ages have faced that temptation. But Wacker is not convicting Pentecostals of this; rather, he is pointing out that those first Pentecostals were adaptable and willing to change the way they delivered the message while keeping the content the same. This is perhaps the key lesson to take away from Wacker’s tome; if we are to honor our predecessors in the faith, we would do well to face our own culture with similar flexibility.