I have been slow in writing this post because I have wanted to do my experience justice.\u00a0 In late November I crossed the country, stopping off in Lawrence Kansas for Thanksgiving with family before returning to California.\u00a0 Starting from the east coast, on my way to Kansas I visited friends who had moved to Springfield, Missouri.\u00a0 As much as any place Springfield probably deserves\u00a0 to be called the \u201cbuckle on the Bible Belt\u201d and is certainly not noted for its Pagan community.\u00a0 There might be one, but if so I did not have the pleasure of meeting any.\u00a0 Instead I stayed with an old friend from college and his wife, who is an ordained minister in the Assemblies of God, the largest Pentecostal denomination in the United States and a major force within conservative Christianity.<\/p>\n
I arrived Saturday, and Sunday they invited me to a meeting at the James River Assembly of God<\/a>,\u00a0 a megachurch just outside Springfield.\u00a0 I have never been interested in attending or listening to Southern Baptists, but the Pentecostals have always interested me. Their focus is on personal interaction with the Holy Spirit rather than exclusively on a crabbed, selective, and heartless parsing of Biblical texts.<\/p>\n Some of their congregations are known for speaking in tongues and other manifestations of their encounter with Spirit. Years ago when I worked at a healing center in Berkeley oriented towards Brazilian Umbanda we learned a great deal about such phenomena, although there was no speaking in tongues.\u00a0 A wonderful Black woman there visited a Black Pentecostal church in San Francisco and reported to me that the energies appeared to her to be the same, but that the congregation seemed less knowledgeable as to how to work with them.\u00a0 Karen\u2019s report made me permanently curious to see for myself, though I never made it to the San Francisco group.<\/p>\n Their openness to direct encounters with Spirit has also made them disreputable in the eyes of many mainstream churches, and some conservative Evangelical churches regard them as possessed by demons. For them God somehow decided not to communicate with people directly after Jesus.\u00a0 Maybe He was tired.\u00a0 Interestingly, the Pentecostals are also much more open to the role of women in positions of authority, as with their having women ministers. This is interesting to me in my social science guise because openness to such phenomena is traditional greater among women than among men in Asia, Africa and Latin America.<\/p>\n Do not misunderstand me.\u00a0 These folks are not liberal Christians although at least some do not reject science in favor of such mindless silliness as taking Genesis \u201cliterally.\u201d I am pretty sure their voting patterns have little if any overlap with my own.\u00a0 Michele Bachmann\u00a0<\/a> and Sarah Palin\u00a0<\/a>\u00a0 are members of the Assemblies of God. There is much within the denomination to worry those of us who believe that government should be under the control of citizens rather than those who think they know their God\u2019s plans.\u00a0 While my friends knew I was a Pagan, most did not.\u00a0 But if that were all there was to it, there would be no need to write this post.<\/p>\n But there is more to it.<\/p>\n Chaged views of Christianity<\/strong><\/p>\n I have been trying to understand the mixes of spiritual truth and darkness in Christianity ever since I became a Pagan.\u00a0 In the years before becoming a Pagan I had become intensely anti-Christian.\u00a0 The fear and pain involved of working myself free from the deeply instilled fear that my brief flirtation with a variety of fundamentalism had instilled a deep antagonism.\u00a0 I am sure many readers can appreciate this.\u00a0 However, after having a series of spiritual experiences that made me a Pagan,\u00a0 I had to rethink my blanket anti-Christian attitude.\u00a0 If Spirit was immanent within the world then everything in the world had some kind of connection to it, however small or misunderstood.\u00a0 Even Christianity. To the surprise of some Evangelicals I interacted with in an interfaith conference, becoming Pagan mellowed my outlook on Christianity.<\/p>\n I have come to look at Christianity as one vehicle among many by which people could try and bring themselves into better harmony with Spirit. There was Torquemada but there was also St. Francis, for every corrupt minister and stone-hearted parishnoer there were others with good hearts who found meaning in their services and rituals, meaning that helped make them better people.\u00a0 Some were attracted to Power, others to the Sacred.\u00a0 Should we become a well established and numerous community I am sure we will find the same variety among us, although currently there are not enough \u201cperks\u201d to attract many of the worst sort.<\/p>\n Like us Pagans, Christians sincerely attracted to Spirit faced the problem of understanding what was beyond the power of words to communicate.\u00a0 I and many Pagans take our lessons from nature, Christians from scripture, and for some such as Pentecostals and Quakers, also from personal encounter.\u00a0 I have no doubt my approach is best for me, but I can not be dismissive of the approaches followed by others.<\/p>\n I also had to take seriously the fact that while the criticisms of Christianity by many atheists were often well taken, it was equally true that other Christian denominations had developed in wonderful directions, the Quakers for one.\u00a0 Very interestingly, the reason the Quakers got that name was because they were also personally often taken over by the power of what they thought of as the Holy Spirit. Quakers quaked. They also increasingly\u00a0 put personal revelation and openness of heart in place of the crabbed readings of theologians and ministers.\u00a0 The fruits the Quakers left to European civilization are wonderful, most spectacularly in initiating the abolition of slavery, one of humankind\u2019s oldest institutions while the Biblical literalists condemned them as heretics and argued God approved of slavery. Today as I understand it, Quakers no longer \u201cquake,\u201d but many churches still practice collective silence until someone is moved by Spirit to speak. I have been deeply impressed with the Quakers I have met.<\/p>\n The Service<\/strong><\/p>\n It is from this rather complex perspective that I attended services at the James River church. It was unlike any church I had entered, resembling more a combination of mall and concert hall. The building was huge, with room for some thousand attendees. It seemed as if the most devoted members could spend their entire non-working or sleeping hours there if they wanted, and some likely did.\u00a0 The main assembly room was huge, with a spacious stage.\u00a0 As I entered with my friends a rock band started playing devotional Christian music.<\/p>\n They were good, very good and their music was lively.\u00a0 Devotional did not necessarily translate to \u201cRock of Ages.\u201d\u00a0 The music had zip and zing and audience of mostly younger families began to stand and sway and sometimes sing with the music.\u00a0 The songs were mostly if not entirely about God\u2019s love.\u00a0 Compared to what I had expected from what I had heard about Pentecostal services, it was pretty sedate, but compared to any Christian gathering I had even seen, it was very lively and the energy was good. A giant screen behind the musicians broadcast their faces so no matter how far away we were we could see them.<\/p>\n I thought this was a \u201cpre-service\u201d event, and as I had my camera with me, I started taking pictures.\u00a0 Immediately someone came up and very politely said it was fine to take pictures, but I could not use a flash.\u00a0 The place was dark enough that without a flash pictures were impossible.\u00a0 But much more importantly, the music was actually a part of the service.\u00a0 Had I known, I never would have been so disrespectful as to try and photograph it.\u00a0 It would have been like taking pictures of a circle casting while a guest.\u00a0 Embarrassed, I put my camera down and never thought of photography again till it was over.<\/p>\n While the \u201cpackaging\u201d\u00a0 of the music was entirely alien (I prefer small groups and meeting in nature), the message seemed to me a good one.\u00a0 No words about Hell, no references to fear, no talk of \u201cus versus them.\u201d It was positive.<\/p>\n What about the energy?<\/p>\n My years of shamanic training have made me quite open to what I call \u201cspiritual energy,\u201d\u00a0 and as I said, one of the things I most hoped to experience was the kinds of energies Pentecostals are known for having.\u00a0 I was not entirely disappointed.\u00a0 It was definitely there although standing in a row of theater seats made it hard to \u201cgo with it.\u201d\u00a0 And indeed, I did not see anyone else in the congregation get very taken with Spirit at the time, although their involvement was far more bodily and joyous than I had ever seen in any church I had ever been in, be it High Church Episcopal or a Fundamentalist gathering. I suspect a smaller congregation, where people were less spectators and more participants, would have brought in more lively behavior.\u00a0 My friends told me that was precisely what happened in smaller churches with older participants.\u00a0 If I make it to Springfield perhaps they will take me to such a service.<\/p>\n