Why The AG Has Left Me
October 17, 2008
This is a great topic, Tony, thanks for opening it up to us.
EDIT: This post can now also be found on an Assemblies of God blog with a lot more voices for discussion then our blog. http://www.agthinktank.com/?p=262
I think it’s best if I start by explaining my personal history. I am a fourth generation Assemblies of God-er through my dad’s mom’s mom. I grew up in an AG church. I’m the son of an AG minister, and I graduated with a Pastoral Studies degree from an AG school. For this reason, I don’t think it’s appropriate to speak of me “leaving the AG,” when in fact, this is impossible. I owe so much to my parents, the people at Oak Hills Church that helped me grow up, and certain influential people at North Central who have been invaluable to me in recent years as I’ve matured. My heritage is Assemblies of God and I take great pride in where I’ve come from, not because of any institution, but because of the amazing people who’ve been involved in who I am today. With that said, I am not not pursuing credentials with the AG, nor currently attending an AG church, though I do intend to enter full-time, vocational ministry.
For the three reasons below, I would like to explain how, in fact, I feel that the AG is leaving me
1) Methodological Freedom, Doctrinal Chains
Imagine an hourglass, turn it sideways, and now focus on the bottle neck. This is a common picture in my mind, when I think about the AG credentialing process. On the inside there is the promise of unlimited possibility, a non-hierarchical structure where any Pastor with a good idea is free to explore how it might work in a church plant. (He/she perhaps may not always enjoy the direct support of everyone in the movement but certainly no one would try to stop them.) My parents first enjoyed this freedom when they planted Oak Hills Church in the MN district in 1991.
My father’s credentialing process was relatively painless, because he had no major doctrinal reservations with the AG. Fast forward to my life, however, and I find getting licensed with the AG intellectually and spiritually impossible because of what I’ve learned.
The tragedy here is that there are many people from the AG who I agree with on a heart level about how church should feel and engage culture. Should the fact that I disagree with (for example) the finer points of the AG’s understanding of Eschatology (which takes up an inordinate percentage of the sixteen fundamental truths) block me from ministering with the movement? Is bickering over the specifics of events that have not happened yet really what the Church was put on this planet for?
Ultimately, the AG doctrinal bottleneck through which I would have to squeeze in order to reach the AG’s remarkable methodological freedom is too small for my conscience—perhaps I’ve read too many of my textbooks?
2. Disconnect From The First 1500 Years of Church History
With my tongue in my cheek, I’ll illustrate what I see as the typical Pentecostal pastor’s inner timeline of Church history.
1. Jesus
2. First Century Church described in the book of Acts
3. Catholics mess everything up for more than a millenia
4. Luther saves the day
5. Mainline Protestants mess everything up for a few centuries
6. Asuza Street saves the day
I apologize if this seems disrespectful, but the discovery of Christianity’s rich history has been the most revolutionary aspect of my own personal reformation—and for that reason I can occasionally sink into cynicism when describing my older mindset.
As I see it, part of being Christian is plugging into an ancient faith. By participating in this timeless Church, I enter into communion with all the other Christians in the world and throughout history. Even though I may have nothing in common materially with a underclass housewife in Argentina or Athanasius writing against heresy in Alexandria; we all belong to Christ, and for this reason, we all belong to each other.
This really shouldn’t be such a problem. Perhaps the reader is thinking to his or herself, “Reed, why don’t you just plant a new church with this special emphasis instead of trying to reform the way we’ve been doing Church our whole lives?” To be honest, I agree with you. I don’t really expect the AG to change it’s core identity nor really think it needs to. After all, that’s why the movement has methodological freedom.
For a while I hoped that this method would work, and even looked into how I might be able to plant a more liturgical (but still transformational!) AG church. Indeed, this idea seemed very plausible out of my home church when talking with my parents and close friends. But unfortunately even this idea eventually hit a dead end because of issues #1 above and # 3 below. You see, it is precisely this connection to the ancient church that feeds so many of my doctrinal hangups with the movement.
The real tragedy here is not merely that the AG and I disagree, but that I learned about these disagreements at an AG college, from AG professors, reading textbooks that I was assigned to read! Who then, is leaving who?
3. The Risk of Small Issues
Allow me to be a little presumptuous in saying something as a representative of my generation: young people today care about big, fat, global issues. Poverty, world peace, pluralism, homosexuality in the church, climate change, etc… are a daily part of my interactions with my peers and they are something that we actually believe we can do something about in our lifetimes.
With that in mind, I am afraid for the future of the AG. There are amazing people in the Assemblies of God—many of them have had a profound affect on my life. I believe that these people could provide a very wise, Holy Spirit conscious, and needed voice on these issues. But unfortunately (it seems these days especially) the AG is bogged down with inner power struggles, minor theological disputes, and harsh rivalries.
Frankly, I don’t want to spend the rest of my ministry arguing over the initial physical evidence, if it’s OK for a minister to enjoy an occasional glass of wine or the precise timeline at the supposed end of the Universe. These are not the issues that will change the world.
However, the world is not without Christian movements that are dealing with these issues.
The Episcopal Church is experiencing an unparalleled crisis right now, and it will likely cause a split in the Anglican Communion. As tragic as this is, some of the most important writings right now on these big, fat, global issues are coming out of that wounded movement, both liberal and conservative. The day is already here when AG youth pastors need advice on how to deal with a homosexual highschooler who wants to join their youth group, they are not consulting our movement, but the Anglicans. When undergrads at AG schools are asking questions about their Muslim friends at their job, they are not looking to AG pastors, but to Lutherans. I am just one of many young AG ministers who have found powerful, Holy Spirit-led, revolutionary worship in the liturgy of Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches.
It is on this last issue in particular that I bear the largest pastoral burden. There are many, many young people leaving the AG because of bickering on small issues and antiquated stances on the big ones. On many of these problems, the AG is not without wisdom, but is simply silent.
Reed Carlson
St. Paul, MN
reed.carlson@mac.com
reed
Tony Hunt
jstambaugh
Shawn Wamsley
October 18, 2008 at 0:28
Wow… very well put indeed. And I don’t think you sounded at all disrespectful about your idea of church history.
I especially appreciated your third point because I’m right there with you, every day. I mean, were he alive today, would you expect to see Christ debating initial physical evidence, or do you see Christ sharing a meal with an AIDS infected transvestite because that person, in that moment, really needed someone to talk to?
P.S. I miss you guys.
October 19, 2008 at 10:17
Thank you for your post, Reed. Much of it resonates with my own experience as a 3rd generation A/G-er. I too learned to think critically about theology first in an A/G Bible college – where I was also encouraged to attend seminary at Gordon-Conwell. I too have chosen not to pursue credentials in the A/G for very similar reasons to your own, and I appreciate the clarity of your thoughts. What will it take to break the bottleneck?
October 24, 2008 at 1:50
I suppose that is why some people are talking of “the forgotten ways”.
It’s what Ralph Winter called the “BO-BO” theory of church history – that everything “blinked out” at the end of the apostolic age and “blinked on” again at the Reformation. Like Mormons – early saints, and latter-day saints, but no saints in the middle.
July 13, 2009 at 13:48
Sorry, guys, but this all seems so self contradictory to me.
Your A/G Bible College taught you that you could not minister in the A/G if you learned what they taught you?
That sounds like the old joke, “If I tell you the secret then I will have to kill you.”
An A/G church history professor taught you that the A/G does not understand church history?
If he is A/G and if he understands church history then it would seem that his statement was a self contradiction.
What am I missing here?
July 13, 2009 at 14:08
Roger,
George Wood ran this as a series over at AGThinkTank.com, and there was a good bit of discussion regarding the finer points of this post and the experiences of others like Reed, many of whom are contributors and regular commentators at this site. If I remember correctly, the series especially dealt with dialoguing over the reasons younger ministers were not going to seek credentialing with the A/G after finishing at an A/G institution. You may not get what you feel is a satisfactory response on this thread, because we (well I) feel like we have gone around on this merry-go-round a few too many times already.
Shawn
July 13, 2009 at 14:47
Thanks, Shawn! Anthony (Tony) sent me here from a thread on Calvin at AGThinkTank.com
July 13, 2009 at 18:34
Welcome to the blog Roger!
It’s been a while since I revisited this post and it’s been interesting experience for me to reread it. It seems so long ago! Ha! How could I have changed so much in less than one year!
I’ll do my best with your points:
Oddly enough. A center for honest intellectual pursuit will inevitably create variances in opinion, (even a religious institution can only establish acceptable parameters for this variance).
Many of my professors disagreed with certain aspects of A/G Culture. Many disagreed with each other. Many had inner disagreements within themselves. The short answer to this question is that while my profs might have had some hangups in one area, they had high praise for the A/G in other areas—enough that they felt their hangups weren’t big enough to make a break. I suppose, in some of these instances their praises (no matter how valid) weren’t strong enough to convince me.
The longer answer involves a discussion of academic exploration—of being unafraid of what one discovers and so on. I suppose my A/G professors encouraged me to pursue my troublesome questions to their logical end. As I delved further and further into critical scholarship and Church History, I found that the thinkers I interacted with looked less and less like the Evangelical theologians I’d grown up with. It was perhaps chance (or providence?) that many of the Christian Thinkers who pulled me out of the mire of doubt were from unfamiliar traditions I’d never fully explored. They called to me as ones who’d traveled through the dark night and came out the other side, calling “Here is faith! Here is the Church! Here is Christ!” If this sounds corny, it’s only because I’m very thankful.
The article is a bit gray in the area so I apologize. I learned Church History from two nominal Charismatic Catholics with unconventional A/G ties.
July 13, 2009 at 19:25
Roger,
At the most basic level it is really quite simply that we could not agree to the Fundamental Truths, therefore we could not be ministers, mutatis mundasis – we could not follow God’s call to the ministry.
*I did learn early church history from the Dr. Glen Menzies – a jewel on the AG crown of jewels
July 13, 2009 at 22:14
Reed and Tony,
Thank you for responding to me. I can understand the difficulty in explaining “why” to strangers.
Thank you for being gracious to me.
Roger
February 2, 2010 at 1:45
[...] Church instead of the denomination of his youth, Assemblies of God. I just discovered his post Why The AG Has Left Me and would encourage you to read [...]
April 5, 2010 at 11:33
I’m not sure I understand the initial argument of your post. It seems to me that what you learned from NCU was that you were not A/G. You got smart & moved on. Which, BTW, was a lot smarter that me. It took me 12 years of ministry b4 I learned that.
April 8, 2010 at 21:35
Thanks for sharing Bob, it has been encouraging the solidarity we have found with many such as yourself. I hope Vineyard is treatin’ ya well!
Peace
April 15, 2010 at 13:46
Wow, where were you guys when I needed you? That’s right, you weren’t born yet. I am 61 years of age, fourth generation Pentecostal and have attempted to reform the AG movement for almost 40 years.
I have served some of the best and most well intended of pastors, but we have failed at reaching our cities, though we now have well funded schools/universities and for most have moved across the tracks!
Still love the people, but as the mayor of my city, I hardly know that most of those pastors exist, except I call on them!
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