Why Pentechorus?
Welcome to Pentechorus. Four purposes drive this blog.
- A call for true Pentecostal revival.
- Visioning a new kind of Pentecostal church for the postmodern world.
- Conceptualising Pentecostal ethos through postmodern paradigms.
- Encountering Jesus as the Baptiser in the Spirit.
What you’ll find in Pentechorus
A call for true Pentecostal revival
Pentechorus envisions a new Pentecostal revival. Throughout the world, Pentecostalism has come to a crossroads. This is a crossroads between two future paths. One path is death as a dying traditionalism. Yet the higher path is that we evolve into a living tradition, which is faithful to its calling as a needful gifting within the universal Church.
What was and remains this perennial calling of Pentecostalism? To proclaim through word and deed, God’s Year of Jubilee (Luke 4:16-19):
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor. . . .
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.”
Through a “latter day” outpouring of the Holy Spirit, God raised up the Pentecostal movement as a prophetic and apocalyptic witness to the coming Kingdom. This is a witness that calls the Church to her existence as a pilgrim community, by envisioning Kingdom realities that counter culturally challenge the prevailing realities of this present evil age.
“I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh . . .
Even upon my slaves, both men and women . . . I will pour out my Spirit; and they shall prophesy.”
We encounter this calling through the Pentecostal baptism in the Holy Spirit. Through this baptism in the Holy Spirit, God empowers us, especially the marginalised, towards the full fruit of redemption in all its complete spiritual, social, racial, economic and political ramifications. It is this calling, which throughout the history of its existence as a movement comprised the prophetic calling of Classic Pentecostalism.
Through the baptism in the Holy Spirit, God empowers the powerless with a “prophetic imagination.” This prophetic imagination has enabled us to dream of “new futures,” hopes, and yearnings so long denied and suppressed by the prevailing powers of this present age.
For this reason, Classic Pentecostalism received from God a revolutionary ethos. This is an ethos and spirituality directly arising from the seminal, embryonic and spiritual DNA of the Azusa Street Revival. This ethos was and still is a revolutionary manifestation of God’s Kingdom. It is a manifestation of the Kingdom breaking in, challenging the authority, and breaking the power of prevailing oppressive realities, which have separated us from one another. Moreover, this manifestation of God’s kingdom, which is the anointing of the Holy Spirit, delivers those whom it set free, into one heterogeneous community of the Spirit.
This was therefore an ethos, which empowered every believer into full immediate vocalised participation within the gathered community, regardless of education, race, or social strata. This was an ethos therefore privy towards the marginalised, so that our community may remain fixed towards a goal of complete social, racial, and demographic inclusiveness and reconciliation.
“Tongues of fire . . . came to rest on each of them.”
Because God has been pouring out His Spirit on “all flesh,” we speak in a new tongue that transcends every other social, racial, and demographic tongue, which previously demarked our separation from one another.
Yet Pentecostalism wanes because as a revival movement, so many of its communal centres and streams throughout the world are retreating from the movement’s seminal and perennial role within Christianity. The future of Pentecostalism hinges on whether we can once again recover our “prophetic imagination.”
Through this prophetic imagination, God speaks into us His dreams of a better world that is coming. It is coming and now here, though sometimes only manifest as a mustard seed. The Kingdom of God is at hand. Even now, the axe is laid at the root of the trees. But every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.
The time has come to pray for a new Pentecost; a new outpouring of the Holy Spirit. We can pray for an “open heaven.” In times like these, we must also pray for a new Pentecost because the Pentecostal movement also needs a new “Pentecost.” We need to turn and again see the fire in the burning bush. As a movement that is now at a crossroads and waning through the forces of institutionalism, there is indeed much to turn from.
To further explore this discussion, visit and download the following keynote Pentechorus manifesto essays:
Part 1: The Revolutionary Power of Pentecostal Spirituality
Part 2: The Decline of Pentecostalism as a Revival Movement
Part 3: A Vision for True Pentecostal Revival
You may also want to visit the posting titled, “The Space where Dreams are Born.”
Visioning a new kind of Pentecostal church for the postmodern world.
Second, I am envisioning that these reflections will eventually shape the ethos of a new kind of local Pentecostal church. This is a church where effort is made to ensure that our personal and communal paradigms, values, practices, behaviour, and aspirations are shaped and scripted by the story-world of Jesus, and not the story-world of our surrounding culture.
This means that we keep our liturgical worship, biblically driven; discerning how our liturgical worship is both shaped by, and evoking the Biblical story- rather than according to the world’s story and ethos. We must therefore stress more the being-ness rather than the doing-ness of the Church, recognising that the biblical authenticity of all our “doing,” arises from our being-ness. Therefore, a prophetic church must be theology-driven rather than consumer or market driven.
When we do this, only then can our personal and community life exist as a visible, counter-cultural community arising from its internal movement towards God’s dream, which will always call into question the prevailing culture and world we live within.
There is an outpouring of the Holy Spirit which if we are open and willing, will transform our congregations into communities that will become more known by the world as counter-cultural alternatives to the predominate consensus, social conventions, values and practices of the world, than as congregations which are relevant and contextualised to the world’s culture and setting.
Even more so, if a Pentecostal church is to be faithful to the tradition of Classic Pentecostalism, it must also be foremost and visibly identified by the world, as a community more sensitised to the socially marginalised, than to the socially affluent, powerful, privileged, elite, and secure.
In doing so, such a church will visibly manifest before the world, an alternative community that is inclusively embracing and reconciling diverse peoples and populations into a heterogeneous community. Such a Church however will receive its nourishment by Spirit-given, prophetic hope, wherein Spirit-inspired speech envisions, inspires, and evokes alternative realities and futures reflecting God’s dream for creation.
I believe that Christian spiritual theology, not the world- be that as manifest through either the modern or postmodern cultures which drive the prevailing consensus of this present age, should primarily influence the church. What I have therefore also presented here, is a theology of Pentecostal experience, purposed for the building of a church turned toward a vision for true Pentecostal revival. Such a church is not only turned towards a true vision of Pentecostal revival, but is seeking, thirsting, anticipating the fullness of a new outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon the entire Catholic Christian Church.
And we pray for this outpouring that when it comes, all the world may know that the kingdom of God is now dawning upon us, is still breaking into this present evil age, countering the prevailing realities and empowering the poor of the earth towards their complete redemption into the riches of God’s kingdom. This redemption, which Christ availed to us through the cross, He is now making visible through eradicating every social, racial, economic and demographic barrier that separates people from one another. His intent is that we become wholly and visibly reconciled to one another in Christ, as the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church.
Conceptualising Pentecostal ethos through postmodern paradigms.
Third, I am also envisioning, a Pentecostal ethos emerging within postmodern wineskins. Every epoch of human history, and every human worldview, exists under the judgement of God. Yet the Holy Spirit also speaks redemptively through each wineskin and worldview. So while every epoch paradigm exhibits the corruption of humankind, each also expresses vestiges of God’s creative Spirit at work through the providential outworking of His purpose in human history.
For good reason, we have valued the trans-rational experience of God’s Spirit coming upon us. Yet partly due to our right valuing towards spiritual experience, we have generally lacked awareness of our own modern paradigms. We have failed to perceive that 20th century Pentecost fell within the wineskins of modernity. Through our naive human failings, we have lacked awareness that we have picked up and internalised within our presumed “Christian” belief-system, values, practices and behaviour, so much philosophical baggage that reflects not the biblical story-world but the story-world of philosophical modernity in its worst of forms.
The result is that we and our churches become more shaped by modern management models, pop psychology, and consumerised entertainment impulses- rather than biblical theology, servant-leadership and spiritual worship. Pragmatic relevance too often, displaces spiritual reality, and has displaced a true Pentecostal ethos and reality.
We have traditionally viewed with suspicion the act of engaging the very term philosophy, because we have comically dichotomised spiritual experience from moral and intellectual reasoning. Most of us are not aware how deeply wedded modern Evangelicalism has become to the modern philosophy of human arrogance. We have generally lacked awareness to our own modern paradigms. So we have mistaken the wineskin for the wine!
But today the soil is sifting and has already sifted. We now live between the twilight of one era, and the dawning of another. Regarding the Christian Church, particularly the modern Evangelical Church, the postmodern voice is often times today something of a pagan “Cyrus,” whom as “God’s Anointed,” He has raised up to call us out of faith in ourselves and back to faith in Christ alone. Thus, through the cataclysmic events demarking the displacement of every Christian church entrapped within idolatrous trappings of modernity, a New Reformation. It will be a Reformation very much parallel to and possibly as significant to the 16th century Reformation.
The modern wineskins caused us to imagine the Triune God in mathematical calculations. Yet we are now hearing from the ancients, that what they came to discover in God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, was as the “dance of God!” Trinity means that God is dynamically and relationally alive, as if the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are eternally moving in a joyful, circular rhythm. They saw the Trinity as the perichoresis (peri- “around,” + “chorus”).
The dance of God. Yet the Triune God has opened the circle, making space for you and I. God’s Triune life, is the message: He invites us into the rhythm of His eternal dance. That is why the prophet spoke: “He will exult over you with loud singing, as on a day of festival!”
Seeking after and entering into God’s dream, song, and dance- and inviting others to this heavenly party, is what Pentecost is all about. God is passionate. His passion comes upon us, as His comes upon us. God poured out His passion upon His prophets. Today, He is still pouring out Pentecost.
I believe that as an oral culture, Classic Pentecostal spirituality will find its most natural release not through 20th century modernity, but through a number of cultural paradigms that are defining the emerging postmodern world. This will be a Pentecost, bursting through new wineskins; a Pentecostal ethos bursting through wineskins of postmodern metaphors and paradigms.
For the postmodern turn towards understanding reality through the power of symbol, metaphor, dialogue and oral-driven story telling, offers us our true moment in history, for it is here we realise that Pentecostal spirituality can interface with the postmodern world in ways unprecedented during the 20th century. Indeed, we must do if the broad ethos of Classical Pentecostal spirituality is to survive as a renewal movement and witness of Christ to the postmodern 21st century world.
Furthermore, our movement into the postmodern 21st century world will require our evolving into a living tradition that is faithful to our perennial calling and revolutionary ethos as a prophetic and apocalyptic witness to the coming Kingdom. Yet we must do this in a manner that is fully ecumenically engaged as a communal gifting within and towards the entire Catholic Christian tradition.
We must in all humility, stand convinced that the revolutionary ethos which we enter into through the Pentecostal baptism in the Holy Spirit, is an ethos and spirituality which God has entrusted to us as a movement through the Pentecostal outpouring of the Holy Spirit.
Through its deconstruction of the modern meta-narrative and myth of scientific certitude through human ingenuity, postmodernity is positively reminding us within the Body of Christ, that every church tradition is gifted as an interpretive community. Yet God has poured out His gift into earthen vessels; flawed vessels flawed through the utter realities of human weakness.
So like other spiritual traditions existing now and in the past within the Christian tradition, we who are representative of Classic Pentecostal spirituality, must perceive ourselves as weak earthen vessels. Yet we are earthen vessels filled with a distinctive charism (gifting), that we may contribute our gifting back to the God as the Spirit’s manifold presence throughout the entire Catholic Christian faith.
As Pentecostals, we must therefore recover our original ecumenical vision and spirit. This means that even as we seek to maintain our core distinctives, and even as we posture ourselves as a gift to the greater Christian tradition, we also remain ecumenically engaged with the entire Christian Church that we may also receive gifts and the enduring wisdom and depth already entrusted within the greater Protestant, Roman Catholic, and even Eastern Orthodox traditions.
We do this knowing that the Spirit has entrusted gifts to their traditions. And also, that our roots lie within their existence as our spiritual fathers. The spirit which thus enjoins us to offer our gifts to the whole Church, thus also enjoins us to nurture an openness to hear and receive other gifts found within other traditions, which to some extent may find at least a small niche within our own Pentecostal spirituality.
Encountering Jesus as the Baptiser in the Spirit.
Finally, I am envisioning a church where we preach through word and deed, the full gospel of Jesus our Saviour, Baptiser, Healer and Coming King. This a church where we are fanning into flame the fires of Pentecost.
This means that the baptism in the Holy Spirit, lies at the centre of life in Christ. Through the baptism in the Holy Spirit, what Jesus first began to do and teach, He now continues to do through the Church when He pours out His Spirit upon us.
In the pluralistic culture of the Church world today, with its attendant marketplace of competing doctrines readily and popularly available through the both hard and soft copy, the definitive contours of Classic Pentecost are often blurred. Yet amongst the interpretive communities within Scripture, there is also all through the Bible a tradition of the Spirit’s vocational-prophetic anointing that finds its fullest expression- as we Pentecostals often agree on, in Luke-Acts.
For at the centre of the prophetic ethos which God has entrusted to Classic Pentecostalism, is the movement’s distinctive doctrine and experience of Spirit-baptism, experientially signified by the phenomena of speaking in tongues. This baptism in the Spirit is not a one-time, past event, but an ongoing encounter with Jesus, the Baptiser in the Spirit.
Historically, we have called this tarrying before the Lord. We can keep on seeking from Jesus, a fresh baptism in the Holy Spirit. This promised life of encounter through seeking after the Baptiser, is the climax to the biblical tradition regarding the vocational anointing of the Holy Spirit. A Pentecostal church ought to be especially informed by all the biblical symbols and metaphors of the Spirit’s presence, and that while we live in the Age of the Spirit, we need to seek a continual drinking of the Spirit.
A genuine and authentic Pentecostal ethos will indeed therefore manifest an “ethos of radical difference; a “radical alternative,” “to the prevailing consensus of the day,” arising from “an apocalyptic re-evaluation of everything” that had been taken for granted prior to encountering Jesus as the baptiser in the Holy Spirit.
Through the baptism in the Holy Spirit, we take a radical step into Jesus’ life-story, whereby God is further re-creating and restoring us into His likeness. Through Spirit-baptism we are thus experientially baptised into the biblical story. This story has the power to script to our own life story, as a people delivered out of Egypt, journeying now through this present age by the Spirit’s presence, as we march to a new world order, the Zion of God, where justice will roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.
It is through each new shattering experience of Spirit-baptism, that our Lord Jesus Christ disciples us through radical and new re-evaluations of so much we take for granted. Filled with the Spirit of prophesy, we become more attuned with God’s dream for the full manifestation of His Kingdom throughout all creation. Jesus empowers us to question the prevailing consensus, and prophetically proclaim through word and deed, a new future for the world around us.
What you’ll find in pentechorus
Within Pentechorus, you will find entries, essays, paradigms and theological reflections, each directly or indirectly reflecting a vision for true Pentecostal revival in the postmodern world.
You will therefore want to read through the blog’s four purpose statements. Together, these four purpose statements comprise the “About Pentechorus” page, which is the main anchor-page of the Pentechorus blog site:
1. A call for true Pentecostal revival.
2. Visioning a new kind of Pentecostal church for the postmodern world.
3. Conceptualising Pentecostal ethos through postmodern paradigms.
4. Encountering Jesus as the Baptiser in the Spirit.
To further explore the discussion developed through the four Pentechorus purpose statements, visit and download the following keynote Pentechorus manifesto essays:
Part 1: The Revolutionary Power of Pentecostal Spirituality
Part 2: The Decline of Pentecostalism as a Revival Movement
Part 3: A Vision for True Pentecostal Revival
You may also want to visit the posting titled, “The Space where Dreams are Born.”
These manifesto entries, as well as other important key entries, are also found under the blog’s “Pentechorus key entries” category.
Each entry is also themed and exists as a word calling the Pentecostal movement towards its needful evolvement into a living tradition, which is faithful to its perennial calling as a needful communal gifting within the larger Christian faith tradition.
Believing that within postmodern world that the Wesleyan roots of Classic Pentecostalism need even greater appreciation, Perichorus is thus also attempting to root Classic Pentecostal ethos, within the Wesleyan four-fold synergy of Scripture, tradition, reason and experience.
These reflections therefore also seek to consciously address how the doctrine of the Trinity, should shape the life of a local church, and can even facilitate a Pentecostal ethos that is responsive to the challenges of postmodernity.
Therefore, it’s good to begin visiting this site at the following two main pages:
Every encounter with the Holy Spirit is actually an encounter with the Triune God. A true Pentecostal ethos is thus actually, an ethos that is shaped by the Triune life of God. This is an ethos facilitating the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit.
Monte Lee Rice (© copyright September 2008)
Great insight. Thank you