Over 100,000 people are expected to join the Azusa Now meeting in Los Angeles, CA on Saturday April 9, 2016. Pentecostal leaders like Heidi Baker, Bill Johnson and Daniel Kolenda will speak at the event which is arranged by TheCall.
Category Archives: Spirituality
War, Love, and Powerful Miracles
It sounds like the perfect ingredients for a fictional novel, but this is actually the true story of how Craig and Médine Keener met each other and eventually got married. PCPJ got an exclusive interview with one of the authors of the forthcoming book Impossible Love.
An Interview with Candy Gunther Brown
How does science relate to the supernatural? This intriguing question is one of the issues that professor Candy Gunther Brown at Indiana University has been researching. An expert on the international Pentecostal and charismatic movement, she has been particularly interested in Christian supernaturalism in the Global South, which broadly corresponds to Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Micael Grenholm of PCPJ got the chance to conduct an interview her.
The Great and Holy Call
by Faith Totushek
Why am I a peace and justice Charismatic Christian or a Holy Spirit Activist? I’ve pondered that for a few weeks and here is where my heart is. God’s people, right from the beginning, have been given a great and holy call to be agents of God and image God on the earth. So I will begin where the Bible begins, in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
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Prayer as an Act of Resistance
by Derek Minno Bloom
As a teenager, I was politicized around issues of poverty, oppression, racism, etc. I felt the church I was involved in focused too much on prayer and not enough on action. Some Christians talked a lot about hope, but not much about making those hopes a reality; they launched many campaigns based on charity, but few based on solidarity.
I attended the Anarchy and Christianity Conference in Champaign-Urbana in 2006, where issues of race and anarcho-primitivism were the main topics. Towards the end of the gathering I asked if people wanted to pray as an act of resistance. We prayed for God’s hand of justice to fall upon the world. I believed that others as well as ourselves could be liberated from the chains of patriarchy, racism, and war because of our prayers.
Why I as an Activist Love the Gifts of the Holy Spirit
The Pentecostal and charismatic movements have a bad reputation among Christian anarchists and activists. There are too many examples of healing evangelists who control the masses through manipulation and hysteria, with promises of supernatural encounters only to gain money and status for themselves. Furthermore, many Pentecostals and charismatics support nationalism, war, discrimination and inequalities. They bless the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands, they preach a prosperity gospel where strong faith leads to great wealth, they deny climate change and don’t care about the environment.
Yet, I am totally convinced that every Christian activist should embrace the gifts of the Spirit and pursue signs and wonders. Why? Because the mess I just described is of course not genuine a fruit of the Spirit, it is a result of what I call the Corinth Syndrome, when charismatic Christians portray their own crazy ideas and practices as divinely inspired.
The church at Corinth was experiencing charismatic chaos; they loved spiritual manifestations and everyone spoke in tongues simultaneously, but they showed no care for the poor and some were living in sexual immorality.[1] Paul’s solution to the Corinthian problem is not commanding them to be less charismatic; on the contrary, he urges them to seek the gifts even more![2] However, he emphasizes that this must be done in order and in love.
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Holy Spirit Activism
“I am fully convinced that activism for peace and justice should be performed in the power of the Holy Spirit. Miracles, healing, prophecy and evangelism should be combined with peacemaking, economic equality, simplicity and care for the environment, just as in the biblical church.” -Micael Grenholm
