If Pietists and Pentecostals are like cousins, then certainly Pentecostals and Methodists are even closer in family formation. After all, it was the revivalist Wesleyan movement, blended with a dose of Moravian Pietism, that gave birth to Methodist, Holiness, and Pentecostal forms of Christian faith and practice. In the United States by the early 20th […]
Hello, cousin! That’s the first thing that came to mind when I read this month’s “A Week in the Life of a Pietist,” by Christopher Gehrz. Too few scholars have drawn attention to the deep affinities between Pietism and Pentecostalism, and to Pietism’s influence on Pentecostal faith and practice. Pentecostalism has a complex root system […]
My mother grew up a Southern Baptist. She was born a stone’s throw from the small clapboard church in Shiloh, Tennessee, where she first met the Lord and learned the hymns she sang throughout her life: Tell Me the Story of Jesus, I Love to Tell the Story, and In the Garden. Each one of […]
Dr. Wesley Granberg-Michaelson writes with such clarity, humility, and tenderness about his adopted Reformed tradition that in reading the post I thought, for a second, maybe this is the way to follow Jesus. After all, conversion – taking up a different Christian expression – has emerged as a leitmotiv in these Respectful Conversations. Quite a […]
I once met a retired Ugandan Anglican Bishop by the name of Christopher Ssenyonjo. Bishop Ssenyonjo was (and remains) an outspoken advocate of LGBTQI equality in Ugandan civil society and in the Church of Uganda. He founded Integrity Uganda, an organization that advocates for the full inclusion of LGBTQ Christians in Anglican church life. Bishop […]
When Mennonites, Amish and other Anabaptists are considered in historical perspective, they are classified as radical reformers, a family of dissidents whose relentless criticisms of both church and state shaped an ekklesia that looked nothing like the late medieval Latin church, nor the developing alternatives offered by Lutheran or Reformed Protestants. It was this Anabaptist […]
Mark Ellingsen had me hooked with the words freedom, spontaneity, and fun, terms he uses to round out his explanation of what it means to follow Jesus along Lutheran paths. Quite honestly when I hear “Lutheran,” those are not the first words that come to mind. Bach chorales, perhaps, but that’s a rather rarefied form […]
Decades ago, on my first visit to Rome, I stood inside the Church of St. Peter in Chains, watching a stream of people, mostly elderly, stuffing their alms into an offering box. How could the pastors of such an ornate palace accept such a thing, my 18-year-old self asked? It shocked my conscience and I […]
I have the toughest job of all the reviewers, I fretted as I read David Ford’s posting on the Orthodox tradition. True, we all share the daunting task of speaking for the people in our respective Christian traditions – in my case, the world’s estimated 279,000,000 Pentecostals, a notoriously fractious assemblage of people. (If we […]
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