Four purpose statements of Perichorus:
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.
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.
Monte Lee Rice (© copyright September 2008)
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