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

Introduction

| 1 Introduction As the metal-and-glass doors swing open and the crowd begins to file into the auditorium-sized sanctuary of the Brownsville Assembly of God, moms, ministers, and many more feel they are entering sacred space. As they walk down the wide carpeted aisles—aisles that in a few hours’ time will be filled with the lifeless bodies of stricken worshipers—some tread lightly, as if they are walking on holy ground. . . . All told, more than 2.5 million people have visited the church’s Wednesday-through-Saturday evening revival services, where they sang rousing worship music and heard old-fashioned sermons on sin and salvation. After the sermons were over, hundreds of thousands accepted the invitation to leave their seats and rush forward to a large area in front of the stage-like altar. Here, they “get right with God.” . . . Untold thousands have hit the carpet, where they either writhe in ecstasy or lie stone-still in a state resembling a coma, sometimes remaining flat on the floor for hours at a time. Some participants call the experience being “slain in the Spirit.” Others simply refer to receiving the touch of God. Regardless of what they call it, these people are putting the “roll” back in “holy roller.” (Rabey 1998, 4–5) Although religious revivals have been said to be “as American as baseball, blues music and the stars and stripes” (McClymond 2007, xvii), they inevitably stir up controversy as well as revive faith. The Azusa Street Revival that occurred in Los Angeles between 1906 and 1909, now commonly credited as the birthplace of Pentecostalism, had followers and detractors, as did the Pensacola Outpouring some ninety years later. In both cases, many people attributed spiritual and social transformations to these events while others were put off by the turbid emotionalism they saw at these revival meetings. The Assemblies of God (AG), a Pentecostal denomination, was founded in Hot Springs, Arkansas, in 1914 by men and women whose lives had been changed by the Azusa Street Revival. By the 1990s membership had reached 2 | Introduction a plateau and the early Pentecostal fervor had cooled. As the century came to a close, however, another revival known as the Pensacola Outpouring, which broke out on Father’s Day in 1995 at an Assembly of God church in Pensacola , Florida, offered hope for those seeking a new Pentecost like the one reported in the biblical book of Acts. In this account, Jesus’s believers, who had gathered on the Jewish feast of Pentecost following his resurrection from the dead and ascension into heaven, experienced “tongues of fire” and began to “speak in other tongues.” Although traditional Christians came to regard this event as the birth of Christianity, Pentecostals emphasize their interpretation of this biblical experience over simply remembering the historic event. Just as onlookers apparently were drawn to the first Christian Pentecost by unusual somatic manifestations, the faithful, the curious, and the media alike were drawn to the Pensacola revival. For the next few years the experience described succinctly in the epigraph above were reported (and repeated) in scores of AG churches around the country. The Assemblies of God at the Crossroads: Charisma and Institutional Dilemmas (Poloma 1989; hereafter referred to as Crossroads) provided a sociological assessment of the AG through the lens of Max Weber’s thesis concerning the inevitable routinization of charismatic experiences. According to Weber, spiritual experiences are at the root of the origin of new religions; these experiences often morph into religious doctrine that gives meaning to the original experiences, and into religious rituals that commemorate them. In this process of routinization, the actual spiritual experiences of the visionary founders and early followers are eclipsed by religious institutional developments that focus on institutionalized beliefs and practices. While making room for angelic rumors about revitalization through accounts of historic revival experiences , the cold sociological facts pointed to the AG being on a journey from its early “charismatic moment” toward a routinization similar to that experienced by countless other sects and denominations in modern history. When Crossroads first appeared in print in 1989, there was little evidence of pentecostal revitalization in the AG, in other Pentecostal denominations, or in the so-called charismatic movement or “second wave” during which mainline Christian denominations (commonly referred to as charismatics or neo-pentecostals) experienced revivals in the 1960s and 1970s. The routinization of charisma within American pentecostalism1 seemed to be taking its predicted course. However, a third wave of the movement began...