Confessions of an Ex-Pentecostal

Memorial Day 2009 - I find as the years pass the Pentecostal churches themselves that I used to attend are fading from my memory and what I remember instead about those years now are the jobs I had and the places I lived, and the family memories connected with them. I can see now that those were very pleasant times, full of good memories, that remained largely untouched by my inner confusion regarding where I was going to church.

The one exception to this rule is the Bible college classes I took at the first large Pentecostal church of which I was a member. Those I still remember very fondly from time to time. By and large, the fanaticism of the church services did not intrude into the classrooms of the Bible college. Most of the teaching was drawn from standard evangelical commentaries and exegetical works, and therefore contained much of solid historical value. There in those classrooms, at many times in my Bible college career, I was learning more of the Word of God as I had hoped I would when I left the "worldly" university to "move on with God" in Bible college.

But not as much as I thought then. I can see now that even there in the Bible college classrooms I was somewhat at odds with the reality of what I was actually involved in. I was not living a theologically or spiritually aware life, because I was in fact simply ignoring many things happening, or being said, in the church services that otherwise would have troubled me had I thought about them too deeply or pursued their implications too far - things that would have clearly revealed to me that, in the final analysis, I was not really "learning more of the Word of God," but was being led astray from that Word into an anti-church, cult-like mind set.

Looking back now, I think that was because in Pentecostalism there is an unreconciled tension between personal interpretation of the Bible and a common, doctrinal confession of faith that all believe the Bible to teach. In retrospect it seems to me that the real guide to interpreting the Bible in Pentecostal churches was not primarily the text's grammatically expressed meaning but rather one's personal experience of its meaning - "getting the revelation." One of our pastor's favorite sayings was, "He who has an experience will never be at the mercy of he who has only a doctrine." In my opinion, this was the "principle" that leads to the perversion of Sola Scriptura within Pentecostalism, even while most Pentecostals sincerely think they staunchly defend it. I know today that a true application of Sola Scriptura means that we must not look outside the Bible for other sources of Christian teaching or revelation. The meaning of the Bible is not in a slew of personal revelations (either from oneself or from others) occasioned by individual passages isolated from their context, but rather in the grammatically determined cognitive meaning of all of its passages taken together—doctrinal teaching, in other words.

Scripture is the complete revelation of God's will for man, not merely something that is used to substantiate "further revelation" from other sources. If Scripture, the Word of God, is truly the source for all knowledge and teaching concerning salvation in Christ and life in Him, then no other sources like the utterances of "prophets" today, interpretation of "tongues" today, and the messages of specially anointed teachers today are needed; yet Pentecostal churches urge heavy use of all of these modern, extra-Scriptural sources of revelation. But nobody within Pentecostalism, obviously including myself at the time, realized the inherent contradictions and dangers of that approach. Because of that confusion in Pentecostalism about what exactly constitutes divine revelation, I eventually found myself following a false trail, having lost the path of faith on which the Word of God should have kept me, had I truly been following it and learning more of it.

Well, these thoughts of the past seemed somehow appropriate on Memorial Day, but enough for now—except to say I am thankful God was faithful to preserve me by his Word through those hard times and has now set my feet upon solid ground. May He do the same for all who read these thoughts of an ex-Pentecostal.

Out of curiosity this morning I listened to an mp3 Podcast by a former minister of one of the Pentecostal churches I used to attend who now has his own church down in California. The message was titled "The Frightening Fallacy of Phariseeism." The fallacy was identified as the idea that one can use external methods of controlling behavior to deal with one's sin. Pharisaism was held up as bad because it gets people focused on their own religious behavior as a means of getting right with God. Well, so far so good. It's easy to agree that using external methods to control behavior don't do any good against sin, or in producing true righteousness in us. That idea is of course solidly Biblical, because the Bible reveals that what makes us righteous in God's eyes is not any righteousness of our own but only that of Christ, which righteousness we have solely because God has imputed it to us by his grace through our faith in Jesus. Our eyes should not be on what we do or experience, but on what God has already done for us in Christ.

This message of the gospel wasn't so clear in this fellow's own message, though. As it went on, a strange tone entered into it. It turned out that in this minister's teaching, what true righteousness is and what we Christians really need is "intimacy with God"—being exactly like Jesus was during his earthly ministry, including healing people physically just by being near them because of the glory of God emanating out of us. (I'm not kidding or exaggerating—he really says this.) And how do we get the intimacy with God that the ignorant church-going masses have missed? Why, by trying harder to get it of course. We need to spend more time alone with Jesus! We need to seek him better and harder! Whatever we need to do to get intimate with God, we need to do it!

Pardon? By doing that, aren't we right back to putting the focus squarely on our own religious behavior? Spending more "time alone with God" and seeking him better than ordinary Christians do is the way to get more righteous than them?

Considering all the craziness I saw (and which the minister I was listening to must also have seen) perpetrated by Pentecostals in hot pursuit of "intimacy with God," it's incredible to me that people are still out there preaching that delusional and dead-end message. Seeking "intimacy with God" is the biggest and most Pharisaic lie of all sold to Pentecostals because it leads to colossal egoism, elitism, and preoccupation with subjective "spiritual" feelings and experiences instead of leading to a simple faith in the objective Word of God, which is the only way Jesus can be truly known. That lie of "intimacy with God" leads people into pursuing anything that will give them what they personally think is an experience of God's presence, no matter how dubious those experiences are from any other standpoint. (And, by the way, where is that phrase in the Bible?) By holding up an unrealistic, theologically mistaken idea of what the Christian life should be, Pentecostal pastors like this guy are setting up people up for uncertainty, deception, and eventual disillusionment and burn-out when they find out it's just not true.

One thing that bothered me more and more as time went on during my years in Pentecostalism was its lack of a satisfactory place for the church.  I knew few people who were actually satisfied with the churches they were attending.  I myself certainly wasn't, and I was growing increasingly uncertain about what I was looking for in a church.  Few Pentecostals even agreed on what the church was or should be, nor were there many existing churches they could point to as fully embodying, or fully teaching, what they themselves believed. I, with almost all Pentecostals I knew, had come to give very little importance to any particular church, or to any particular church's doctrine, believing strongly only in a vaguely defined invisible church of all who accept any doctrine of salvation by faith in Jesus, or as all those "called by God" in any sense anybody chose to define that.  All Pentecostals I knew, including myself, thought that "believing the Bible" or "following the Bible" was enough and that church was, in effect, optional.

In regard to doctrine, I came to see the teaching of any particular church as not important and not even valid if it didn't line up with my own prior interpretation of the Bible and my own experience of the salvation I believed it taught. In other words, the church's place, insofar as it even had one in my thinking and in the thinking of most Pentecostals I knew, was merely to align with one's own interpretation of the Bible and one's own ideas of what it meant in one's life.  I realized that I was treating the Bible merely as an instruction manual or rule book that could be read and followed in isolation from any particular church, or even from the church as it has actually existed in history from the time of the apostles.

The reason this came to seem unsatisfactory to me was that, ironically, it didn't line up with what the Bible itself depicted concerning the church.  It shows us Jesus himself didn't leave us with any written teaching but with the apostolic church, which then preached and taught his Word to the world, only later committing to writing the gospel of God's grace in Jesus.

The Bible never shows us that anybody is supposed to read it by themselves, figure out what it means and get saved by themselves as a result, and only then look around to see if there's a church someplace that happens to teach an interpretation of it that matches their own.  Although that is more or less how many Pentecostals view the Bible, salvation, and the church in relation to each other in actual practice, such a picture is backward and doomed to failure.  Pentecostals think they're going only by the Bible, but what they're doing is in fact impossible and insane from a Biblical point of view.

The gospel was not meant to be encountered in a vacuum, deduced from the pages of the Bible by individuals sitting alone and reading it; instead it's supposed to be encountered as preached and taught by ministers of the gospel who then baptize those called by God through that gospel into the church, where those believers are supposed to continue to grow in the faith through the teaching, the administration of the Lord's Supper, and the prayers of the church as it gathers together as a body: "...continuing steadfastly in the apostles' doctrine and fellowship, and in breaking of bread, and in prayers" (Acts 2:42).

The church is shown in the Bible to be more than simply a formless collection of all those who had been in some sense saved by Jesus through the Bible, according to each individual's ideas about what it says concerning Jesus, faith, and salvation.  The church is shown to be a structured institution one must necessarily enter through baptism by a minister of the gospel, and in which one must regularly gather to hear the teaching and preaching of the Word by ministers of Christ and to partake together of the Lord's Supper that those ministers serve by the Lord's instruction.

The Bible says the church is the house of God, and is the pillar and ground of the truth (1 Timothy 3:15). That is, the church is where God is, and is the place which supports the truth and is its proper setting.  Therefore to me it now seems self-evident that however one defines the church, God did not mean for us to arrive at faith and truth independently of it, nor to picture it as an optional piece of the Christian life.

The uncertainty and disagreement in the Pentecostal world about the place of the church was one clue that that world was not set on a firm foundation, and I wasn't either as long as I remained in it.

No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.

Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment? Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they? Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature? And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is, and to morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith? Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed? (For after all these things do the Gentiles seek:) for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things. But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you.

Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.
(Matthew 6:24-34)