Flaky Pentecostalism is not didactic. But good Pentecostal hermeneutics might be a little different from a strict historical grammatical approach.

The triad in First Corinthians 12:4 to 6 not only addresses the trinity but also addresses charismatic gifts, service and works. When studying the word meanings, combining gifts and service results in lasting works. The kind of works that are not burned up in the fire described in First Corinthians 3:13-15.

When I was a new Pentecostal I regularly got together with two friends for Bible study. One night a friend’s wife was out so he hired a baby sitter. This high school girl had some questions about the baptism of the Holy Spirit. She left Holy Spirit baptized, praying in tongues and empowered. We told her to continue praying in tongues and told her God would give her gifts of wisdom on who to pray for and witness to. In about six weeks, she multiplied into about sixty high school students in our Bible study. Gifts combined with service resulted in kingdom work.

With Hybels’ admission of the ineffectiveness of the Willow Creek methods in discipleship, it is disappointing to me that some AG pastors persist in using it. Willow Creek does say their methods are good for filling and paying for buildings but not building the body of Christ we are charged to build. We are charged with kingdom discipleship. Some pastors must be too comfortable in their church’s financial success rather than kingdom success.

“The Church is to be a community of prophets. But from the post-apostolic period to the present it has not functioned as a prophetic community which is powerful in works and word. In fact, in too many places the Church views itself as a didactic community rather than as a prophetic community, where sound doctrine is treasured above charismatic action. Indeed, the preaching and teaching of the word displaces Spirit-filled, Spirit-led, and Spirit-empowered ministry. The Spirit of prophecy has been quenched and the gifts of the Spirit has been sanitized and institutionalized. The non-Pentecostal/non-charismatic church needs to recapture its prophetic heritage, to which it is either hostile or indifferent.

As a prophetic community God’s people are to be active in service. However, all too often the Pentecostal, charismatic movements focus on the experience, the emotion, and the blessing more than they do on Spirit-filled, Spirit-led, and Spirit-empowered service. This shift in focus from vocation to personal experience, from being world-centered to self-centered, renders the service of the Pentecostal, charismatic movement just about as impotent as the service of the contemporary non-Pentecostal, non-charismatic church. This focus on experience rather than on service is like selling one’s birthright of Spirit-empowered service for the pottage of self-seeking experience and blessing.”

This is why the current Pentecostal-hand wringing over its identity vis a vis other evangelical groups is both unsurprising and disappointing: when you let go of your entire identity as Pentecostals with the exception of a couple of “doctrinal distinctives”, you find yourself looking around at your churches and wondering “Why do we not look any different than any other evangelical churches?” In my view, groups like the AG sold the farm to the evangelicals when they tried to become like them in the 40s and 50s. Now, what we’ve got left in the AG (as Mel Robeck has very persuasively and colorfully argued) is a quasi-magisterium who enforces its will on “distinctive doctrines.” Meaning, of course, that for the current AG, initial physical evidence means that every single person who is baptized in the Spirit will speak in tongues, and if they don’t, they therefore aren’t baptized in the Spirit. Where the doctrine actually “says” this, I am unaware. It is not clear at all that this reading of the doctrine is the one necessarily implied by the Fundamental Truths.

But this functionally does not matter: AG pastors whose churches look evangelical have, by and large in this district, given up on being distinctively Pentecostal, buying into various kinds of seeker-senstitive, Willow Creek-style evangelicalism, even though they sign the statement of Fundamental Truths every year.

(PS I should note: there are at least 3 AG churches in the Twin Cities Metro that I think escape this criticism – but they aren’t the hip, chic, large churches).