Kristen Welch

The Sacred & The Pentecostal

This question is just as impossible to answer definitively as are the questions: “What is art?” and “What is rhetoric?” Yet, I will offer my own definition(s), interpreted through the lenses of Pentecostalism and personal experience. Along the way, perhaps a description of what the religious is and how it is manifested in discourse will emerge as well.

The work for my dissertation I completed in 2007 and the book I am working on now addresses the ways that Oklahoma Pentecostal Holiness women preachers create and deploy ethos in their autobiographical texts or transcribed interviews. The “sacred” in Pentecostalism, as well as what might be the most important defining characteristic of a Pentecostal ethos, is the charismatic experience of the baptism of the Holy Spirit which is sometimes accompanied by the person also speaking in tongues. A Pentecostal preacher is nothing and she is nobody if the story of how she experienced this event isn’t told from the pulpit. Even the “call story,” or the account of how a person feels God spoke to her and asked her to preach, means less than an account of Spirit baptism. Furthermore, it is charisma, not education, that lends the Pentecostal preacher power from behind the pulpit. Although Pentecostals in the IPHC (International Pentecostal Holiness Church) have been required to be educated to be ordained for several decades, without charisma—which is interpreted as evidence of Spirit baptism and the subsequent “anointing” of the Spirit on a minister—nothing can save her. Pentecostals won’t listen to her simply because she has credentials; she had better bring the personality as well.

For a preacher, the sacred in Pentecostalism involves encouraging spiritual experiences with God, Christ, or the Holy Spirit during service and leaving ample time for those at the altar to engage in these experiences. It means leading congregations in loud worship with arms raised in worship. At services, some worshippers dance. Others beat the tambourines. Some pace up and down the aisles. Growing up, for me it was not unusual to see the whole church organize and march around the sanctuary. People moaned, yelled, cried, screamed, laughed, spoke in tongues and this is not unusual today as well. Church was not for sleeping and the preacher never seemed able to stay behind the pulpit for very long. He would pace, dance, run up and down the platform stairs. He would cry, speak in tongues, wave his arms. This was the measure of normality for me as I grew up. As a result, I felt that the sacred was anything but quiet, hidden, or unknowable. I was quite surprised to find that so many people felt that it was all of these things when I was over eighteen and able to visit non-Pentecostal churches for the first time. The women preachers I studied sometimes described the disjunction between these two experiences of the sacred as well, particularly one woman who was from a Catholic background before choosing Pentecostalism.

For me as well as for the Pentecostal preachers I have studied, the sacred is a wide-open invitation to experience God/Christ/Spirit. The articulation of this experience can be described as the “religious” as manifested in passionate and sometimes irrational discourse. Personally, my engagement with this discourse has changed over time. As a child, I believed everything. Authoritarianism was in full force, but first as a teenager and then as a young college student, I learned to hold ideas at a distance, turn them over in my mind, question them, inspect them, and either accept/discard/negotiate with them. This is, of course, the essence of what we educators mean by critical thinking. They weren’t using that term in the early 90s, though. So I felt intensely rebellious simply questioning religion, the Bible, and my experiences.

The “sacred” and the appropriate manner of discourse for communicating it – preaching, testifying, singing, praying, speaking in tongues—might come down to hermeneutics but more than that, to ethos. For the preacher, it is all about ethos (St. Augustine says this as well—“practice what you preach” is in On Christian Doctrine). For the apostle Paul, who is even more influential than Christ himself in defining Christianity and establishing the paradigm for a Christian preacher, ethos is built through intimacy with God and humility, not through education, expertise, or rhetorical technique in speaking. The knowledge that is valued from Paul’s epistemological perspective is that of God’s wisdom, and the preacher’s job is to communicate that knowledge to others. The preacher shares “God’s hidden wisdom” as it is “revealed” through the Spirit because the “spirit explores everything, even the depths of God’s own nature” (1st Cor. 2:7-10). Therefore, the preacher interprets “spiritual truths to those who have the Spirit” and speaks “of these gifts of God in words taught us not by our human wisdom but by the Spirit” (1st Cor. 2:13). The “debator,” as a representative of those rhetoricians with secular educations, is described as one who is full of worldly knowledge and expertise (1 Cor. 1:20).

From a Pentecostal’s hermeneutical perspective, the impetus to put “worldly” wisdom to the side in favor of spiritual sources of wisdom was divinely ordained. The effects of this interpretation actually bred some forms of gender equality in the denomination. In the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries, the practice of denying women a college degree which would, to some degree, legitimize their role as preachers was undermined by the Pentecostal practice of relying upon the baptism in the Holy Spirit as the only needed credential for ministry. Paul claimed his knowledge and insights came directly from God; it was logical for early-to-middle-twentieth-century Pentecostals to make a similar claim. Although, as mentioned before, all Pentecostal preachers must be educated now. The final effect was that women had legitimate roles as preachers and religious discourse was open to all who claimed a part of the collective Pentecostal ethos grounded in an articulation of the baptism experience.

So how do I, as a Christian scholar, reconcile religious discourse within Pentecostalism with my liberal, secular education in rhetoric? Again I point to Paul. Although rhetoric and what it stood for—particularly the forms of Sophistic rhetoric denigrated only a few centuries before Paul in the writings of Plato and then Cicero—is denigrated by Paul, it is significant to me that he proves himself to be a master of written, if not spoken, rhetoric. Here is a record of Paul’s refusal of rhetoric: First Corinthians 2:4 says: “Christ did not send me to baptize, but to proclaim the gospel; and to do it without recourse to the skills of rhetoric, lest the cross of Christ be robbed of its effect.” “Conviction,” Paul goes on to say, comes by “spiritual power” not “clever arguments” (2:4). In another example, we see that in Paul’s epistemology rhetoric is associated with “mere words” and preaching is accomplished by “the power of the Holy Spirit” who brings “strong conviction” (1st Thess. 1:5). Thus, Paul divides his use of rhetoric from other uses of rhetoric.

Even so, in 2nd Timothy we find Paul instructing Timothy to “proclaim the message, press it home in season and out of season, use argument, reproof, and appeal, with all the patience that teaching requires” (4:2). Though he does not use the term “rhetoric,” he is explicitly advising that Timothy use rhetorical techniques to argue for the Christian message. Like Paul, the preachers I study are or were charismatic, fully engaged, expert rhetoricians, although they would never describe themselves in such terms. Yet neither Paul nor the preachers can separate voicing the sacred from the persuasive, rhetorical framework of claims, evidence, rebuttal, and a final call to conversion/action. Reconciling the religious with rhetoric means looking deeper into the contexts of Paul’s admonishment to not use rhetoric, and to line it up with what he prescribes in other letters as well.

But even if I can see rhetoric in the practices of Paul and the Pentecostals, rhetoric and Christianity make uneasy bedfellows, and my Christian or religious discourse is not understood to be either Christian or religious by many other Christians I have met along the way. After all, using rhetoric to uncover the elements of persuasion in religious discourse is not without danger. For one, questioning the sacred weakens its mystery, even in Pentecostal circles. For another, rhetoric is and was and will continue to be a powerful tool for dismantling authority. When St. Augustine advised preachers to study it anyway, he was taking a terrible chance with religious institutions in general. This is why I feel that the sacred is contested in my world. Can I be a rhetorician and a Christian? Can I be a Pentecostal Christian and a feminist as well? As a rhetorician, I enjoy unraveling arguments and weighing evidence, but many Christians do not want to learn any of the histories or cultural contexts surrounding scripture that might change their interpretations of it. Few realize that they interpret scriptures, believing fully in their ability to be “literal.” Even fewer know anything of the racial and gender equality brought about by the three year revival on Azusa Street and would be surprised to learn that the single most influential person in Pentecostal history is a black man who was blind in one eye. The IPHC publicly repented of “male domination” in a 1997 Solemn Assembly. However, claims for racial or gender equality have not translated into allowing women or people of other races to occupy administrative positions at the headquarters, although they have occupied other high-level positions that don’t require them to work out of the building in Bethany, Oklahoma. There is a great deal of inconsistency between what Pentecostals say and what they actually do. Sometimes religious discourse is a capitulation to the marginalized, but practices do not change.

So what is the sacred to me now? After refusing Christianity between the ages of twelve and twenty-four, I returned to the faith. I am now thirty-six, so I’ve had about twelve years since I became a Christian again to explore ideas and even some new churches. Yet I always return to the Pentecostal. I simply prefer the doctrines and the atmosphere, even if I don’t always find a comfortable home among the people (As a working mom I’m often ostracized for that reason alone). The religious discourse sounds political to me now whereas it did not when I was younger; the community work seems progressive instead of just “Christian,” and the Christians who engage me in conversations find me leaving them with something to think about instead of finding me an easy target for religious admonishment for not being their ideological twin. Yet, comfortable or not, the sacred is a part of my life as a scholar, not just because I study women preachers, but because I rely on God to help me meet my goals. The sacred is also a part of my life as a mother, a wife, a friend, a neighbor. The sacred is in the ordinary because I often see the extraordinary in it these days.

While I am not and have never been particularly charismatic (an obvious flaw in a Pentecostal, by the way), I still feel most at home in the songs, preaching, and fellowship of a Pentecostal church. The sacred is loud for me. The religious manifests itself in discourse by the loyal repetition of key “Pentecostal” ideas voiced by the pastor and/or from reading the Bible. The sacred is part of my reality as a Christian scholar. I suppose I recognize the religious in discourse when it strikes a chord of recognition within me. Perhaps, to sum up, I could say that the sacred is still being defined for me as a blend of experience and knowledge. Changed forever by my education in rhetoric, I may be marginalized in Pentecostal churches, but do not feel weak in my position. The negotiations continue.