The Last Disciple

A Contemporary Primer on the Theology and Practice of the American Pentecostal Movement

Pafford

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9781621891239
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

In an era of religious mass production, so many church models invest their energies toward gathering a crowd, singing songs, and preaching good sermons. Much of the focus is on the shop window. While this is important, it is not enough. Doing church is not enough. Churches that grow disciples don't simply attract a crowd, they provide a strategic theological basis for what they do, and that requires serious thinking about the methodology of church life.The Last Disciple is a book for those interested, not simply in doing church, but in asking hard questions about why we do what we do. Answers to these hard questions are the very basis of the foundation of the local church's existence. Rather than simply attracting a crowd, have you evaluated why your church does church? Have you ever felt that your church tradition has lost the meaning behind its existence? What would it look like if you recaptured your church's meaning? Is it possible to do this while bridging the relevancy gap of common culture? There will be different answers for different contexts, but this book will give you tools for thinking it through by asking the right questions.

Part 1

Ecclesiology: A Look at the Church

The church has a mixed history of introspection, and I would submit that a church with a strong sense of identity is better equipped to fulfill its purpose. It is my hope that this book will give your faith community a better sense of how to discover its identity. In the next several chapters we are going to discover, and in some cases rediscover, what makes a local church a church.

A local community must do more than form its concept of the gospel around the local church. Indeed, the implications of personal narratives, architecture, a church’s history, technology uses, philosophy, and even church governance structures are huge factors in the formation of a local community interpretation. It is so critical to understand how each of these is charged theologically.

The formation of good ministry practices comes from a solid theological foundation. However, it appears that local churches have lost their way in terms of service, and in so doing have inadvertently created a theological void. It is therefore vital that local churches reinvest in developing good theological models. This subject is investigated here.

Today’s churches must also rise to meet many other challenges including urbanization, discipleship, postmodernity, developing relational ministries, eliminating cultural irrelevance, and addressing issues of self-centeredness. A basic understanding of these challenges will help a local church to meet the real-world needs of its community. Finally, this part studies some best practices that a local church can employ to meet the needs of its community. These practices include good communication, developing a biblical social justice mindset, and creating dependable communities that can trust one another through embodied selflessness, truth, and intercession.

1

The First Churches

What then shall we say? When you come together, everyone has a hymn, or a word of instruction, a revelation, a tongue or an interpretation. All of these must be done for the strengthening of the church.

1 Corinthians 14:26 (NIV)

Imagine what this passage from 1 Corinthians would have sounded like to its original readers. Probably, it would have been read aloud to them. Maybe over a red, crackling fire, a small gathering of believers would meet near the back of a dark, cold alley to listen to it. Imagine how a passerby might have viewed this tattered group, gathered as they were on humble fringes of the great city of Corinth. This passerby might have wondered why they uttered such odd things in such a profane place. “After all,” he might mumble, “such things as prophesy, hymns, and revelations belong in the pantheon of gods, or at the Temple of Apollo.”

However, like the prostitutes at the Temple of Apollo, Corinth is a city of façade. It is a veneer of beautiful skyscrapers. Temples of worship and civic structures push through the clouds, but underneath them is an ugly underbelly. For this cold alley is part of the new Corinth, reborn from old. The buildings in this part of town are no more than one hundred years old. They were rebuilt after Julius Caesar began reconstruction in 44 BC.1 Here, the city is populated with artisans and slaves, most who have come from Rome. And because new money attracts people like a dead carcass attracts flies, there are thousands of people flooding into the city. This ragged congregation mirrors the population of its city. Jews, Greeks, Barbarians, slaves, and freemen are gathered here. These people are what some civil leaders have called human waste.

The passerby slows when he hears someone from the group suddenly break forth in song. “How bizarre!” the man thinks aloud. “What type of religious group is this? No special building, no specific order of service, or even a specialized priest or leader.” What makes it odder, still, is that this hodgepodge band keeps croaking peculiarly about one God. “Atheists! Not only are they so myopic to think only one god exists, but they don’t even go to a particular temple to worship it.”

Someone from the group notes the man’s gaze and invites him in. By now, his curiosity is piqued, and he can’t resist. He enters the circle.

The singer continues his song. He is a fellow Greek, of all things. And his song is one of encouragement. “We are hard pressed on every side,” he sings, “but in him we’ll find rest despite the rising tide. We are perplexed, but not in despair though we are fined unfair. Persecuted by man but not abandoned by his hand. Struck down, but nonetheless amen.”

The beauty of the tune is overwhelming, and the passerby remarks to himself how lucidly the lyrics draw the picture of this group, surrounded as they are by hard-pressed clay on every side, but nonetheless finding solidarity in their God.

As the man’s curiosity wanes, he notes the mutual encouragement among the members of this group. He sees the value and feels the strengthening of this group as they build up one another. He thinks to himself: What a curious gathering! What a funny calling . . . ek-kalo . . . ekklesia! The man finds this little word game humorous. Nonetheless, he is amazed by the group. Frankly, he’s awestruck. But he has appointments to keep, and so, despite his amazement, he departs the group and continues on his way.

What this man experienced on the “mean” streets of Corinth was what some would characterize as a church. Key facets and elements allow this gathering of people to be part of the institution God created, not only as a representative of things visible, and invisible, to come but also as a phenomenon called the kingdom of God. He called it an “ekklesia.” When we study it, we call it ecclesiology.

Ecclesiology

Classically put, ecclesiology is the study of what is necessary for an institution to be a church—an ecclesia. Over the centuries, theologians have asked the constitutional question of necessitation: What makes a local church part of the church? For the Catholics, ecclesial constitution requires a priest and a mass because these are the methods through which grace is dispensed. For the Reformers, the requirements of necessitation are the Word and the Sacraments; Luther and Calvin would argue that an institution without these elements simply does not constitute a church.

The Roots of Pentecostalism

Pentecostalism is a modern movement that began at the turn of the twentieth century. Founded in an era of rapid social changes and notable attitudinal shifts, the Pentecostal Church has always been challenged to reflect on and express its self-understanding in a fashion that is faithful to the tradition of the Pentecostal movement. As I research and reflect, I marvel at the changes this church has experienced during the past one hundred years. It is true that, in its growth, the Pentecostal movement stands second only to the Catholic Church. Pentecostalism, as large as it is, can remain relevant by carefully receiving insight from the ingenuity and strategy of some of the secular disciplines.

Within the last fifty years, we have seen the Pentecostal Church move into mainstream religious mass production. This has had unfortunate results in terms of institutional values, which include a highly volatile prosperity gospel. This breed of Pentecostalism has strayed far from the Pentecostalism of the early twentieth century. Conversely, some of the aging structures have also become Pentecostal in name only. The result is a fragmented church model. These competing models are, at times, at odds with each other insofar as denominations must reconcile their traditions with an ever-changing, ever-expanding worldwide community. It is an issue that demands attention and reflection. The ability of traditional, contemporary, and unique church models to be critical of their own preferences is essential.

What transcends denominational history is the important theological axiom that all Pentecostals rely on the Spirit of God. This is the same Spirit that breathes life into the church and moves it toward the eschaton.

Pentecostal Ecclesiology

The subject of Pentecostal ecclesiology has received little, if any, explicit articulation. Perhaps, in our Free Church approach where each local church is sovereign, we find this esoteric practice to be a waste of time. After all, we are evangelistically pressed toward the eschaton. Our pragmatic approach has thus left questions of precision for those more interested figuring out what a church is, rather than having church itself. And so, our stance has been to leave those questions for theological skirmishes: Our business is the spread of the mission of the church, the missio dei. Indeed, it is the mission that defines us.

Perhaps, in the end, Pentecostalism’s greatest legacy will be indigenous principles of grassroots movements in developing countries. It is a remarkable feat to create contextualization models that pull people of a given ethnic group toward the gospel without synchronization. As a result, today, Pentecostalism is the largest-growing segment of the church in the world. We’ve gone from zero to four hundred million in less than a hundred years.2 There’s nothing new about this information. Nonetheless, much of the established movement of Pentecostalism in the United States is denominationalizing and, in the wake of one of the greatest evangelistic spreads of the gospel, the church that remains begs the question of what constitutes a Pentecostal Church.

Pentecostalism and Charismatic movements share some commonality, but there are also differences. As is pointed out by Kärkkäinen, “Pentecostalism represents a revival movement with a restorationist tendency and consequently a low view of history and tradition.”3 While not true of all Charismatic groups, many Charismatics at least share the history of their tradition. For example, Catholic Charismatic groups emphasis that the gifts have always been part of the church in one way or another. The Pentecostalism and Charismatic movements also find points of distinction in the dates of their respective foundings—classical Pentecostalism begins in 1906 and Charismatic movements begin in the 1960s.4 While these dates represent important points of history, a focus on minutia of divergence between peoples of like-faith detracts from the mission of the church itself. As such, I will not go to great lengths to find divergences within the Pentecostal Church, and will do so only in an effort to describe the complexity of this ever-growing movement.

Definition

Pentecostal ecclesiology, by any stretch, is missional. The mantra of missional ecclesiology is that, without a mission, a church is not a church. In Pentecostal circles, when you say church, you’re saying mission. Even so, we’ve lost some of the connections to our theological body in regard to mission. We have lost our sense of being. And without a theological depth of being, we will lose the rational for doing mission. Without doubt, many Pentecostals understand the value of continuing our mission as we await Christ’s return, and we will continue the mission until that great day. But, we may not have a strong connection to the theological framework of the movement itself. Just like in the body, ligaments can grow weak when they are not stretched. The ligaments are what cause the body to maintain its skeletal structure. We are having trouble defining being. The ligaments are dissolving. We’ve lost the idea of the church as being. The concept of the church as a mystical body, where you sort of just “be there,” 5 is a lost idea to the modern Pentecostal.

Indeed, true believers are the church embodied. Embodiment elicits this idea of a metaphysical wholeness. Wholeness means that believers are the visible church in the truest sense of its physicality and spirituality. To quote Miller, “You do not have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.”6 This notion helps us not just to think of the church as some romantic ideal, but rather as the realistic hope of the world. Nonetheless, when people in a given church explore questions of ecclesiology (whether they truly understand the gravity of their question), they often include “mission” as part of the study, both in the word and in the activity of the church. This framing convention, more often than not, is a window that simply allows people to identify themselves in terms of what we do, but not who we are . . . And all too often, questions of ecclesiology end with answers of mere identification. We, as Pentecostals know what we do. But, who are we Pentecostals a century later? Are we just another mission movement turned denomination? Many fear this to be the case. It is a discovery that has caused a surprising reaction.

Who are we? Are we Pentecostals who have lost touch with our theological being, consigned to drawing denominational distinctions among competing factions? Is this the legacy of the charismatic blowing of the Spirit in the last fifty years? And if we are left wondering who we are, we will only ask how we are different? Distin...

Table of contents

• The Last Disciple
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1: Ecclesiology: A Look at the Church
• Part 2: Christology: Thinking Like Jesus About the Church
• Glossary of Terms
• Bibliography