Blood and Fire

Godly Love in a Pentecostal Emerging Church

Margaret M. Poloma, Ralph W. Hood, Jr.

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780814767481
• eBook ISBN: 9780814737422
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

What does it mean to live out the theology presented in the Great Commandment to “love God above all and to love your neighbor as yourself”? In Blood and Fire, Poloma and Hood explore how understandings of godly love function to empower believers. Though godly love may begin as a perceived relationship between God and a person, it is made manifest as social behavior among people.
Blood and Fire offers a deep ethnographic portrait of a charismatic church and its faith-based ministry, illuminating how religiously motivated social service makes use of beliefs about the nature of God's love. It traces the triumphs and travails associated with living a set of rigorous religious ideals, providing a richly textured analysis of a faith community affiliated with the “emerging church” movement in Pentecostalism, one of the fastest-growing and most dynamic religious movements of our day.
Based on more than four years of interviews and surveys with people from all levels of the organization, from the leader to core and marginal members to the poor and addicts they are seeking to serve, Blood and Fire sheds light on the differing worldviews and religious perceptions between those who served in as well as those who were served by this ministry.
Blood and Fire argues that godly love— the relationship between perceived divine love and human response— is at the heart of the vision of emerging churches, and that it is essential to understand this dynamic if one is to understand the ongoing reinvention of American Protestantism in the twenty-first century.

1

Godly Love and Post-Modern Christianity

An Introduction

No doubt there is much noise in evangelical Christianity. There are many false prophets (and false profits) out there, and all kinds of embarrassing things being done in the name of God. … Many of us are refusing to allow distorted images of our faith to define us. There are those of us who, rather than simply reject pop evangelicalism, want to spread another kind of Christianity, a faith that has as much to say about this world as it does about the next. New prophets are rising up who try to change the future, not just predict it. There is a movement bubbling up that goes beyond cynicism and celebrates a new way of living, a generation that stops complaining about the church it sees and becomes the church it dreams of. And this little revolution is irresistible. It is a contagious revolution that dances, laughs, and loves.

—Claiborne 2006, 23–24

Beyond the kitsch of Christian television and the multifaceted mega-churches that have captivated religion watchers is a post-modern resistance movement with its headquarters on the Internet and many of its congregants meeting in homes and urban warehouses. Its leaders are calling the phenomenon the emerging church, and some, like Shane Claiborne, believe it is an “irresistible revolution” that will draw believers back to the heart of the Christian Gospel. It is more than a theological critique of modern Western Christianity. It is a religious movement that seeks to deconstruct modern religion and to realign it with the dynamic process that we call godly love.

Our initiation into this “irresistible revolution” did not begin with an academic concept or theory but rather with lived experience, details of which are presented in the appendix. One of the authors (Poloma) met Blood-n-Fire founder David VanCronkhite in the mid-1990s and became intrigued with his revolutionary vision, which was receiving national recognition in the evangelical neo-Pentecostal community. Although the phenomenon that would come to be known as the emerging church movement was yet to be labeled, BnF already exemplified its traits and principles.

VanCronkhite dates Blood-n-Fire (BnF) to 1991, when he and three others set out to downtown Atlanta from their suburban church to begin an outreach to the homeless. Within two years BnF was to become a visionary church of the poor heralding a revolution in which the marginalized would regain their pivotal place in Christianity. Beginning with a neo-monastic community in Atlanta that was to include people of all ages, races, and social strata, VanCronkhite proffered a vision for the Kingdom of God and its spread around the globe. At the time that we began our study in 2003, BnF was a thriving church in downtown Atlanta and boasted more than a dozen BnFs in other cities, both in the United States and abroad.

The Kingdom, according to VanCronkhite, would not come about through clever strategies or human power, but through the power of the Holy Spirit working through young people who had caught the vision that he was preaching. The story presented in this book offers a systematic study that explores the relationship between charismatic encounters with God, sacrificial giving of personal dreams and ambitions, and empowerment for service to the poor and broken. Personally knowing the love of God and experiencing its energizing power is at the heart of the vision and is central to what we are calling godly love.

Godly love, a theoretical concept derived from Pitirim Sorokin’s classic work on love (1954/2002), represents an interface between the experience of divine love and human interaction. We utilize his theory, although we embed it within our modification of the contemporary microsociological theory of interaction rituals developed by Randall Collins (2004), which conceptualizes human interaction as a series of rituals. Used together, the scholarly work of Pitirim Sorokin, a mid-twentieth-century American sociologist of Russian descent, and Randall Collins, a contemporary American sociological theorist, provides a forum for presenting our observations on godly love at BnF. We are careful, however, to distinguish our own modified use of Sorokin’s and Collins’s theories from the viewpoints of the narrators of the many stories that form our ethnographic account of BnF.

Emerging Churches in a Post-modern World

Emerging churches have quietly developed within the past decade or so, primarily within the Evangelical charismatic subculture, to become one of several new congregational forms found at the close of the old millennium and the beginning of the twenty-first century (Thumma 2006; Livermore 2007). They represent a post-modern effort to return to a biblically based Christianity as a lived reality. Those involved in emerging churches commonly distance themselves from old labels, including the nomenclature that has been used to describe the various streams of American Pentecostalism (both classic and neo-Pentecostal variations) throughout the twentieth century. The roots of this growing movement, however, can be found deep within the Pentecostal worldview that seeks to bring heaven below to earth rather than to capitulate to the forces of modernity (see Wacker 2001; Poloma 1982, 1989, 2005). If modernity relativized and privatized religion, post-modernity challenges us to focus on religion as a form of life and not as a system of beliefs to be defended.

Thus the emerging church movement does not see itself as simply “another religion.” As Eddie Gibbs and Ryan Bolger have noted:

Modern culture created a secular realm and chased all spiritual things to the margins of society, first relegating them to church and religion and then to the individual’s heart. … Emerging churches are communities that follow Jesus and the Kingdom into the far reaches of culture. Emerging churches destroy the Christendom idea that church is a place, a meeting, or a time. Church is a way of life, a rhythm, a community, a movement. Emerging Churches dismantle all ideas of church that interfere with the work of the kingdom. … For churches to resemble Jesus, they must include the stranger and not recognize two types of people. Modernity is a culture of exclusion. For emerging churches to look like Jesus, they must be countercultural through inclusion. Three “core practices” reflecting a post-modern posture that challenges the modern Christianity are intertwined in exemplar emerging-church congregations: identifying with Jesus’ central message of the now-coming kingdom of God; breaking down the divisions between the sacred and the secular; and life lived within a community of believers for whom relationships are central. (Gibbs and Bolger 2005, 43)

Godly Love and Living the Law of Love

In this book, we define godly love as the dynamic interaction between human responses to the operation of perceived divine love and the impact this experience has on personal lives, relationships with others, and emergent communities. It is this social psychological process that is at the heart of the vision of emerging churches. Godly love begins with a relationship between God and the individual, but its empowering potential spreads to influence others and the community of faithful as it did with early apostles like Paul and Peter, saints of the poor like Francis of Assisi and Mother Teresa, founders of new religious movements like George Fox and John Wesley, and the millions of believers involved in the global Pentecostal movement.

Blood-n-Fire, the case study that provides the account of godly love in this book, is but one of countless congregations in the increasingly influential but loosely structured network of emerging churches. BnF is a religious community with an attendant faith-based ministry that sees God’s love as the center of its vision for church, ministry, and mission. What BnF accepts as an experiential fact, the love of a biblical God for his creatures, we explore empirically, asserting that divine love is experienced as real and therefore can have real consequences. It is with the consequences as a benchmark that we seek to evaluate and assess godly love.

As with other emerging churches, BnF downplays doctrinal nuances of religion in favor of personal relationships: both an intimate love relationship with God and relationships with others inside and outside the church structure. Emerging churches like BnF are usually (but not always) independent entities eschewing denominational labels (Anderson 2006). They cannot be adequately defined by simply what they believe. The issue is rather how they believe. They strive to practice what leading spokesperson Brian McLaren (2004) has termed a “generous orthodoxy” that adheres to the essence of long-held Christian creeds (“vintage Christianity”) while focusing on God’s love and mercy rather than God’s judgment. As with other congregations in this nebulous network, many of the teachings at BnF reflect a holistic approach that minimizes the sacred-secular divide. BnF worship extends beyond church walls, infuses daily life, and foreshadows the coming of the Kingdom of God.

Although the emerging church movement can be seen as a uniquely post-modern development whose beliefs are not argued for but rather simply embodied in the lived experience of their faith, similar dynamics can be found throughout the history of Christianity. Reflecting the wide gap commonly found between ideal culture and real culture, the great commandment to love God and love others as oneself remains a Christian goal to which many have aspired but few have attained. There are groups of people found throughout Christian history—ranging from the early church described in the book of Acts of the Apostles through countless reinventions, reformations, and revivals (including the plethora of new religious movements in twentieth- and twenty-first-century America)— that have created subcultures seeking to close the ideal-real gap. BnF is simply one experiment among countless others found in the history of Christianity. The advantage of BnF is that it is a contemporary “classical” effort to create a Christian community based on God’s commandment to love thy neighbor as thyself.

Many emerging churches of the twenty-first century are spiritual descendants of the twentieth-century Azusa Street Revival (1906–9) that birthed Pentecostalism. Under the leadership of William Joseph Seymour, an African American and son of former slaves, an unusually diverse group of people (at least for a still–legally segregated America)—young and old, women and men, Americans and Europeans, Hispanics and Asians, blacks and whites—gathered to experience what they believed was the Spirit of God. From its humble Azusa Street beginnings, the Pentecostal movement—with its hallmark experiences of glossolalia or “speaking in tongues,” healing, prophecy, and other signs and wonders—would spread throughout the globe (Robeck 2006).

Ever adapting as it emerged into a global Christian religious movement, now second in number only to Roman Catholicism with over five hundred million adherents, Pentecostalism represents a post-modern attempt to recapture the biblical worldview of mystery and miracle and to close the divide between the spiritual and the material (Wacker 2001). In this sense it is both post-modern as it moves beyond the limitations of modernity and pre-modern as it seeks to return to a pristine Christianity where the Spirit of God is palpable. The Pentecostal heritage is central to the story we tell in this work. Like other neo-Pentecostals and traditional Pentecostals before them, BnF members sought to integrate the so-called natural and the supernatural with a spirituality that Steven Land described as “at once cognitive, affective and behavioral” (1993, 41), in which “affections are the heart of Pentecostal spirituality” (44). In pneu-matological theology, which focuses on the Holy Spirit or the third person of the Christian trinity, the Spirit of God is the “living flame of love” that “epitomizes the nearness of the power and presence of God … and celebrates the nimble, responsive, playful personal gift of God” (Pinnock 1996, 9). Many who came to BnF would find this theology made real as they prayed, played, and worked together in the BnF family, a community permeated with personal experiences of godly love that endeavored to share this reality with the homeless poor.

Our ethnographic four-year study provided ample time for complexities in the lived life of godly love at BnF to reveal themselves. We do not seek to privilege our own perceptions over those of others in the BnF community. Nor do we demand that the explanations provided by embedding our narratives with the theoretical views of Sorokin and Collins be accepted uncritically. We are careful to distinguish description from explanation. Our descriptions provide a cacophony of voices representing the complexity that is BnF, but as scholars we are guided by theoretical insights from social science and methodological rules. We must and do explore consequences when claims are made that are empirical and can be evaluated. For example, whether a soul is saved from hell is not a question we answer, but whether addicts abandon their habits is a question that can be empirically addressed.

Godly love as presented by systematic theologians and romantic philosophers can be easily idealized and criticized when the ideals fail to match reality. But reality is more often a kaleidoscope than a fixed specimen under a microscope; it can be multifaceted and sometimes ethereal (Anderson 1990). There is no single “reality” by which BnF can be said to succeed or fail. The account we present, therefore, is neither a theological treatise nor a philosophical critique of love, but rather a social scientific effort to capture descriptions and measures of reported ritual interactions of godly love. Although the effects of godly love are sometimes shrouded in shadows, the gray areas are illuminated by the use of many voices and narratives from the BnF community

Godly Love and Social Scientific Theory

Obviously the love we speak about is neither romance nor sexual intimacy. The love we explore in this book includes “the bonds of respect and acceptance that we sometimes refer to as filial relations and the selfless caring we refer to as altruism” (Wuthnow 2004, 256). In accord with Pitirim Sorokin (1954/2002), who for many is the sociological theorist of love, we also contend that love can include a supra-empirical component. This component is integral to what we are calling godly love—love that is perceived to be of divine origin and with a human response that reflects, even if dimly, the compassion of God. Godly love is found at the center of Christian incarnational theology, which depicts Jesus of Nazareth as God taking on human flesh, who taught in word, by example, and through the power of the Holy Spirit that God is compassionate and unlimited love. Jesus reduced the many Hebraic laws and their prescriptions and proscriptions to one great commandment, namely, to love the Lord thy God with thy whole mind, heart, and soul and love your neighbor as yourself (see Matthew 22:38; Mark 12:31; John 13:34).

Christian Smith, in his discussion of “Why Christianity Works,” unequivocally states that for Christians, “The center and sustainer of all reality is a thoroughly loving God. God is Love.” He proceeds further to describe this God:

God showers gratuitous love on His children beyond measure or merit. God knows when a sparrow falls to the ground. But even more so, God intimately knows and cares about every unique human self. The Christian God does not love the idea of humankind. God loves actual individual people themselves, real persons just as they are. God does not only love people when they are nice and good, but even in their failings, ugliness, and willful wrongdoing. The Christian God’s love is not conditional, contingent, qualified, or partial. It is total, self-giving, unmerited, absolute—overflowing from God’s boundless goodness and tender loving-kindness. (2007, 171)

Christian Smith’s depiction of a personal God who is a significant actor in the daily lives of many contemporary Christian believers reflects the lived religion of the BnF community. BnF regularly shared stories of divine encounters as members modeled and instructed others on how to see the divine signs and wonders around them. Yet due to the prescription of “methodological atheism” as the only lens through which to view social reality within the social scientific community, the very possibility of divine-human interaction has been at best overlooked and at worst denied by many scholars.

Unmasking a Theoretical Blinder

Modern social science has been dominated by this commitment to “methodological atheism,” although it is increasingly recognized in post-modern thought as but one philosophical stance that is privileged no more than any other. At methodological atheism’s base is an uncritical subscription to a social constructionism where nothing of experience is attributed to the object of experience. More balanced is the stance we take here, namely, that of methodological agnosticism. There is always the chance that those who claim to hear from God may actually be hearing from the divine (Bowker 1971). Human experiences reported by subjects as having come from God must be taken seriously, not simply as social constructions (which they partly are), but as actual ways in which God is experienced. In order to “take God seriously” we have sought to move beyond the methodological atheism that has permeated the social sciences toward a methodological agnosticism in which we use as real data the reported acts of God that informants assert they have experienced. Rather than deny their reality, we explore how a defined reality is maintained within a community of people who attempt to live it out (Popora 2006; Hood 2007). Our research on godly love thus seeks to explore the dynamic interaction between God and humans as reportedly experienced by the human subjects in this study—a dynamic we believe to be central for understanding religious behavior in Pentecostal and other biblically oriented communities and especially the new emerging church movement.

Pitirim Sorokin on the Ways and Power of Love

The concept of godly love is an example of what the renowned sociologist Pitirim Sorokin has called “love energy.” According to Sorokin, “Love can be viewed as one of the highest energies known,” and he contends that social scientists can study “the channeling, transmission, and distribution of this [nonphysical] energy” (1954/2002, 36). Sorokin observes that love energy is continually being produced through human interaction and that it can be stored within cultures as humanly produced catalysts of love (e.g., through religious and cultural norms, ideals, values, and rituals). Although his focus is on the love energy produced by human beings, Sorokin (1954/2002, 26) does acknowledge the “probable hypothesis” that “an inflow of love comes from an intangible, little-studied, possibly supra-empirical source called ‘God,’ ‘the Godhead,’ ‘the Soul of the Universe,’ ‘the Heavenly Father,’ ‘Truth,’ and so on.”

Sorokin has not only provided a theory of love that makes room for experiences of the divine, he has also developed a five-dimensional model for assessing love. Sorokin’s first dimension of love is intensity. Low intensity love makes possible minor actions, such as giving a few pennies to the destitute or relinquishing a bus seat for another’s comfort; at high intensity, much that is of value to the agent (time, energy, resources) is freely given. While Sorokin does not fully develop the different potential forms of intensity, his point remains clear. The range of intensity is not scalar—that is, research cannot indicate “how many times greater a given intensity is than another,” but it is often possible to see “which intensity is really high and which low, and sometimes even to measure it” (1954/2002, 15–16)

Sorokin’s second dimension of love is extensity: “The extensity of love ranges from the zero point of love of oneself only, up to the love of all mankind, all living creatures, and the whole universe. Between the minimal and maximal degrees lies a vast scale of extensities: love of one’s own family, or a few friends, or love of the groups one belongs to—one’s own clan, tribe, nationality, nation, religious, occupational, political, and other groups and associations” (1954/2002, 15). Sorokin’s extensity resonates with the classic Western discussion of the “order of love.” How does one balance love for family and friends (the nearest and dearest) with love for the very neediest of all humanity? As an example of extensity he offers St. Francis, who seemed to have a love of “the whole universe (and of God)” (1954/2002, 15).

Sorokin next added the dimension of duration, which “may range from the shortest possible moment to years or throughout the whole life of an individual or of a group” (1954/2002, 16). For example, the soldier who saves a comrade in a moment of heroism but may then revert to selfishness can be contrasted to the mother who cares for a sick child over many years. The duration of love can be longer or shorter depending in part on the type of love and the situation in which it is enacted.

The fourth dimension of love is purity. Here Sorokin wrote that pure love is characterized as affection for another that is free of egoistic motivation. By contrast, acting out of a desire for pleasure, personal advantage, or profit are signs of a love that is in some way “spoiled.” According to Sorokin, pure love—that is, love that is truly disint...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Godly Love and Post-Modern Christianity
• 2 The Man, the Myth, and the Vision
• 3 An Emerging Church Family and the Family Business
• 4 Charisma and Spiritual Transformation
• 5 Godly Love as Emotional Energy
• 6 The BnF Family and the Homeless Poor
• 7 Ideology and Tradition in Conflict
• 8 Smoke, Mirrors, and Holy Madness
• 9 Epilogue
• Appendix A
• Appendix B
• Appendix C
• References
• Index
• About the Author