The Assemblies of God: Godly Love and the Revitalization of American Pentecostalism

4. Structure and Charisma: Doctrine, Power, and Administration

| 79 4 Structure and Charisma Doctrine, Power, and Administration Most people lose or forget the subjectively religious experience , and redefine Religion as a set of habits, behaviors, dogmas , forms, which at the extreme become entirely legalistic and bureaucratic, conventional, empty, and in the truest meaning of the word, antireligious. The mystic experience, the illumination , the great awakening, along with the charismatic seer who started the whole thing, are forgotten, lost or transformed into their opposites. Organized Religion, the churches, finally may become the major enemy of the religious experience and the religious experiencer. (Maslow 1970, viii) Although the humanist psychologist Abraham Maslow penned the above epigraph nearly sixty-five years after the Azusa Street Revival, the early Pentecostals would wholeheartedly have agreed with his thesis. Having experienced Pentecost like they believe the early Apostles did, they did not want to see it fall prey to “dead religion.” Well into the 1980s, when Poloma was gathering data for Crossroads, many AG leaders were openly resisting becoming a “denomination,” preferring to refer to their faith as a “movement” or a “fellowship.”1 There is less talk of the AG not being a denomination these days, but like pentecostals of all streams AG pastors eschew the “religion” label and prefer to describe their faith in more dynamic and relational terms. Despite this resistance to bureaucratization and institutionalization, however, we know of no serious move to dismantle the organizational structure. As we shall see, for the most part, pastors gave high marks to the denomination’s performance of its administrative functions. Using O’Dea’s concept of dilemmas of delimitation, of power, and of administrative order, we can take a closer look at the structural dilemmas faced by the AG as it tries to maintain an efficient organization and its distinct worldview. 80 | Structure and Charisma The Dilemma of Delimitation: Doctrine and Pentecostal Experience The dilemma of delimitation addresses the threat to charisma posed by the relativizing of the original religious message in relation to new conditions. One horn of the dilemma is the danger of watering down the message to fit the times, often rendering commonplace what was originally a call to the extraordinary. As we have seen, the AG runs a risk of grabbing onto this horn with its long history of courting non-charismatic evangelicals who are indifferent and often hostile to the distinct pentecostal worldview. Primitive charismatic tendencies are tamed as favor is bestowed on more pragmatic ritual and organizations. The other horn of the dilemma is the creation of rigid doctrines and religious legalisms established in an attempt to capture and reproduce the charisma of the original movement. As we have seen, the early founders of the AG initially were resistant to forming any kind of doctrinal statement, but they soon found it necessary to produce a statement of faith. The AG Statement of Fundamental Truths is basically a fundamentalistdispensationalist creedal statement, with “initial evidence” added to the other largely eschatological concerns. The adoption of this creed from fundamentalism precipitated the unfolding of the dilemma of delimitation; the stage was set for replacing right experience with right belief—a move that tends to water down the distinct Pentecostal worldview in which the Spirit of God moves freely, openly, and creatively in the lives of ordinary believers. O’Dea and Aviad (1983, 61) described the dangers of delimitation as follows: While the dangers of distortion of the faith require these definitions of dogma and morals, once established, the definitions themselves pose the possibility of another kind of distortion. They become a vast intellectual structure which serves not to guide the faith of untrained specialists but rather to burden it. In theory, it is the task of the Holy Spirit to ensure that Pentecostalism neither sinks into the abyss of content-less mysticism nor becomes rigidly doctrinaire. Pentecostalism in its various faces has continuously needed to balance experience with biblical teachings, with adherents describing themselves as both people of the Spirit and people of the Word. At the heart of Pentecostalism is a conviction that the Bible is the inspired word of God. Pentecostals differ, however, in their hermeneutics, with scholarship tending toward an evangelical rational/propositional theology. They have, as Timothy Cagel (1993, 163) has noted, “aligned themselves with Evangelicals Structure and Charisma | 81 in their move toward adopting the methods of higher criticism,” whereby the biblical text is reduced to the meaning intended by the author of...