“So, you want to go back to Egypt . . . where life is secure?”
title and lyrics from Keith Green’s album, circa. 1980
I arrived in Casper, Wyoming in the summer of 1982, not knowing a single soul. Mourning Keith Green who had just died in a plane crash, I got a job painting houses and began attending the local Church of God. Still affiliated as a Pentecostal minister, it was not long before a church was offered to me in Riverton. I was appointed as its pastor. (The denomination is still presbyterian rather than congregational in its governmental structure. Pastors are appointed by the District Overseer. No elections).
When I arrived, I discovered that it was a “mission” church which was meeting in a former auto repair shop where the minister operated a thrift store and had parked a mobile home in back. All were rented. The mobile home was the parsonage, such as it was.
My affiliation with the Pentecostal movement extended back into my childhood, and in a way, my faith was a legacy of Rev. Don Lyon’s ministry. During the 1960s and 70s, my maternal uncle attended his church, but for the rest of the family living in a small, farmer’s town south of Rockford, we benefited from his television ministry and the satellite home church endeavors of my grandparents. His church was in Rockford North, which was too far away. So, when the home church venture faded, “Rockford South Church of God” was the best alternative and a mere twenty minutes away.
The Church of God is a southern-based denomination. Its headquarters is nestled in the Smokey Mountains of Cleveland, Tennessee, and Lee College (now Lee University) has always been the flagship seminary for its clergy.
It is, admittedly, one of the “holy-roller” denominations with an emphasis on exciting spiritual experiences at its meetings, but still with roots in the “holiness” revivals of the late 19th Century era. Larger and newer denominations, such as the Assemblies of God, pride themselves in being little less “holiness” (a word associated with unbearably strict standards on dress and conduct, for example) and a lot less “roller” in the decorum of their meetings.
While growing up, church meetings were begun with the invocations of spontaneous audible prayers of the entire congregation, many of them praying in tongues in a chorus of discordant – but to my ears, beautiful – supplications to the Almighty for His Divine interventions. In the less “roller” denominations, the opening prayer depends upon the eloquence of a single officiant and you never hear anyone speaking in tongues for fear of being out of order.
I think I saw the pews jumped once during my years among them, many prostrations (collapsing to the floor upon the “laying on of hands” called “slain in the Spirit”), foot tapping dances and jigs, and other emotional outbursts (usually during a rowdy sermon) as manifestations of the “power of God.”
Much later, I would understand these affectations in the light of the antics of fans at football games. Nevertheless, I saw in the Church’s doctrine the legacy of Charles Finney and the circuit rider Methodists of the 19th Century, from which I drew fresh inspiration. Exploring that legacy led me to write my paper “The Pentecostal Tradition at Bay,” a title I pirated from Richard Weaver.
It had at first existed as an addendum to my book on Bible prophecy, Hope for Tomorrow, but later circulated separately:
https://2046ad.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Pentecostal-Tradition.pdf
In that summer of 1982 – coping with the loneliness and stress of lodging in a Casper hostel – I read Richard Weaver’s, The Southern Tradition at Bay, which I regard as more important to understanding the predicament of what I call Evangelia Americana, than his later book for which he received acclaim: Ideas Have Consequences. Ideas Have Consequences has been long-regarded as an intellectual tour d force for conservatives in the post-Goldwater era.
I was introduced to Weaver’s works through Harry Conn at MST. If you want to understand the phenomenon that was Harry Conn, you must read Weaver’s, Ideas Have Consequences. If you want to understand Weaver, you must read his earlier work, The Southern Tradition at Bay.
Weaver was one of the great Southern Agrarians of the middle of the 20th Century who taught at the University of Chicago. Evangelia Americana represents more than anything the unwieldy leadership of America’s Celtic populations by an intellectual class of ultimately Germanic origins: the Anglo-Saxons and Normans being classified as Germanic. The first Pentecostals were primarily Celtic in origin and represented the emotional tendencies which John Wesley saw in the tear-streaked faces of Welsh coal miners in the 18th Century. These were the kind of people who had emigrated to the high-country of the American Colonies.
Leadership was at first to be found in Yale and Princeton, but when those institutions fell to liberalism, the intellectual heirs of the Puritans had to move south and start over in the years leading up to and following the Civil War.
While Finney’s erudition represented the logical discipline of the Germanic mind, yet his fame was achieved from his ability to preach like a circuit rider preacher. Finney’s Oberlin became a by-word in the South, but Tennessee was a border state and the mountain people there – from which American Fundamentalism, including Pentecostalism, would draw its first recruits – represented a people with Southern heroes: who having been defeated in America’s first experience with total warfare, sought consolation from within. The rest is the history of the Southern diaspora.
When I arrived in Wyoming, I was wrestling with many of these issues and after four years as a clergyman in Riverton, I finally left the denomination for good. It was not because I was a postmillennialist, but for a much more arcane reason. Trying to find a constituency with which I could dig roots in the community and a lifetime commitment to my parish, I found that the non-members of my congregation embraced the denomination’s doctrines, while the governing membership did not.
The implications of that incongruity came to a head when I instituted an observance of a footwashing service for one Sunday morning after the main service. Actually, I think it was Easter Sunday. The non-members enthusiastically attended, the board members snuck out the back door. After that, I concluded I was on my own.
Why a footwashing service should matter in Christian doctrine can be found here:
When Moses led the children of Israel out of Egypt, they came with a “mixed multitude” that wanted to go back. But he never let them go back. If anything, the ones that wanted to go back were the ones that died in the Wilderness.
Covenant-breaking has consequences. Church groups which are divided over doctrine eventually split. That has been the way of Protestantism. But church splits have consequences, too, and can only be legitimate if there is a party guilty of violating the Covenant. Like a divorce, Covenant-breaking is the grounds for separation.
When I came to Wyoming, I was a separatist at heart in the tradition of the Pilgrims: Christians who wanted reform “without tarrying for any.” Believing that spiritual power can only come from obedience to the truth, I was on a personal quest of following that truth to attain doctrinal and institutional purity. I never disfellowshipped myself from anyone. It was they who departed from me. . .
(to be continued)
JWS, 4/23/23
For Part 1, go here:
https://2046ad.org/so-you-wanna-go-back-to-egypt-pt-1/
