The following is a post that I made during the reading of Philip Jenkins’ The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity in a recent Doctor of Ministry program that I have now completed. This book is now being used in many seminaries and graduate schools as standard reading. While going to a seminary or graduate school can be a plus, you don’t have to do so in order to educate yourself and think with an EPIC lens.

As one who has a “classic” Pentecostal background (Church of God, Cleveland, TN; Assemblies of God; and Foursquare plus a so called “Third Wave” movement (Vineyard) I often wonder why there is ongoing resistance to the Pentecostal/Charismatic church in USAmerica? While the traditional Pentecostal movements tend to be inbred (opinion), the Vineyard opened up its arms to any Evangelical who wanted to participate before entering into a partnership with a “latter reign” type ministry during its prophetic phase, which made it much more like the classical Pentecostal groups and caused many Evangelicals to view the Vineyard as caught up in a “silliness” itself. During the Vineyards formative days there was an openness to charismatic issues by English speaking Evangelicals who were ripe for a paradigm shift because it didn’t appear to have all the “silliness” of the televangelist. So, what does count for the cultural acceptance of charismatic/Pentecostal issues in the two-thirds world and not so much in the American and English(?) version of the church? What matters of worldview are we still facing?

On page 9 Jenkins says:

In their own way, secular, liberal Americans have distinctly apocalyptic view of the future, while a millenarian expectation of the uprooting of organized religion. At the least, there is a widespread conviction that Christianity cannot survive in anything like its present form

Is this really a “secular, liberal American” view only. It seems that within the church world that there is a growing view that the church must become something other that what she presently is. If apocalyptic can roughly mean “removal of old in favor of new,” a removal of the traditional church forms with something different, then how can one hold in tension the both/and of post Protestantism with the either/or of apocalypticism? Or is it really a “modified” apocalyptic view? More

From SPEC the publisher:

The journey of faith is not easy, particularly for those who find themselves inextricably drawn beyond the confines of established religion towards the unknown horizons of Christian belief.

Journeying in Faith is a provocative and moving book exploring the kind of faith that is built up by many church leavers in the dark and lonely places of faith, and how that faith can be nurtured and developed.

Alan Jamieson, author of A Churchless Faith, uses the testimony of those who have experiences of the darkest places of faith and characters from the Bible to provide a light to the path of those who have moved away from the Church, either physically or in heart or mind.

Also written for those who want to provide support and resources to those in the deserts of faith, this book provides insight into how we can embrace an altogether larger vision of God at work in our post-modern, twenty-first century world.

I attended a conference recently and met an author who has moved away from her faith and church. She was an engaging person and her conversation had not a note of bitterness. She simply moved. If this book lives up to its billing it may help those who find it difficult to embrace the Story of God in our time and space. Take a read and tell me what you think about changing one’s life story.