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.”

Kay Warren is the wife of pastor and author Rick Warren. This book may never sell as many copies as her husband’s book, The Purpose Driven Life, but it is most certainly a very significant book. I confess that I am not a person who reads for pleasure, that is, I do not read to relax or because I enjoy the practice of reading, but I could not put this book down. The author’s brutal honesty about her fears, sense of inadequacy, questions and struggles makes this book quite compelling. Warren writes things that many of us think, but would probably never say out loud.

On the inside flap of the front cover of the book it says, “You have a plan for the rest of your life. God has a plan for the rest of your life. Are they the same?” That is a thought-provoking question and it sets the stage for the rest of the book. Kay Warren is the wife of a very successful pastor. She thought that she and her husband would probably spend their later years traveling around the world encouraging ministry couples, but God had other plans.

In 2002, through a magazine article, she became aware of the AIDS epidemic in Africa. God gripped her heart with the statistics and the photos. After reading that article she began to notice information about AIDS everywhere. She felt that God wanted her to do something about it, but she did not know what. She said to God, “Why are you bothering me with this? There is nothing I can do about it. I’m just an ordinary person.” She agonized over this for a month. She then came to the place of decision; could she go back into her comfortable life and pretend that the AIDS epidemic was not happening? She could not; she said “yes” to the call of God. When she did this she said that her heart was broken and that she was shattered. This set her on the course of becoming an activist raising awareness of HIV/AIDS.