Tony Jones recently posted on his website, over several posts, a paper that he presented for the Society for Pentecostal Studies. I want to link to my two favorite sections of the paper, “What Emergents Have to Learn from Pentecostals,” and “What Pentecostals Have to Learn from Emergents.”

This paper is quite literally the most hope-inducing thing I’ve read in a while. I have long thought that this marriage between Pentecostals and emergents is healthy — even necessary — for both groups in very different ways. (I have similar thoughts about Eastern Orthodox Christianity linking arms with both emergents and Pentecostals, but I should save that rant for another day.)

My personal relationship with Pentecostalism is conflicted. There are ways in which I’m recovering from some of my experiences over the ten years I spent in Pentecostal churches. In many areas of life and ministry, however, it is the better experiences of my Pentecostalism that I am completely desperate to recapture in new contexts.

My spiritual formation within Pentecostalism is what helped me to develop robust epistemology long before I was thinking in terms like “epistemology.” At a very young age, Pentecostal communities shaped me to see that the core of my faith wasn’t cognitive recognition to a hyper-particular explanation of biblical history, but alignment with God and God’s movement in the world. Within Pentecostal communities I learned to seek (and even expect) encounters with God, to worship somewhat holistically, to embrace New Testament language of believers as “saints” more than “sinners,” and to pray as an agent of change rather than a commentator or bystander.

Growing up, I considered myself a Protestant, as did most of the Pentecostals I knew. In retrospect, that was hardly the case. These days, as I meet more and more people whose theology and epistemology are or were far more rooted in Protestantism than my own, I can say that Pentecostal theology and epistemology, while not simply erupting ex nihilo, are almost categorically independent from that of Protestantism (though there are certainly historic connections, with many Pentecostal communities in the West being shaped by Wesleyan heritage). Pentecostals are not alone in this dynamic; people within contemplative traditions (e.g., Anabaptist, Mennonite, etc.) could say similar things about the relationship between their respective traditions and Protestantism.

Maybe this is why so many charismatics and contemplatives in my life (I’m not sure if this is true about those groups in general, but represents my friends and acquaintances) are ready for the (Western) Church to embrace a Reformation-scale shift beyond Western theology. It’s not that these people are particularly homogeneously conservative or liberal in their theology compared to Protestants or other Westerners; it’s that they’ve operated with a different set of “negotiables” and “non-negotiables” than what is prevalent in the West. When your faith is quasi-non-Western to begin with, a post-Protestant and post-Western Christianity sounds far less threatening, I think. So it’s no wonder that charismatic and contemplative groups can warmly receive the religion-altering ideas sometimes tossed around in the emergent conversation.

My observation is that emergents and Pentecostals, if they entered into sincere dialogue with one another, would find that they have strikingly similar lists of “negotiables” and “non-negotiables” in their faith. Yet they have much to teach each other. Pentecostals should listen to emergents speak of eschatologically-driven, incarnate missionality as a central component to the Kingdom’s arrival. Emergents should listen to Pentecostals speak of spiritual warfare as an indismissable component to a post-Western theology of theodicy and the sincerity of the human experience. 

I think Tony is on to something big, and I hope that his credibility and connections can do much to bridge the gap between two communities who have been having similar-but-separate conversations, at least in terms of prodding people on the emergent end of the potential dialogue. If the incarnational missionality and holism of the emergent conversation can infuse Pentecostals, and if the Resurrection-centered ecclesiology of Pentecostals can infuse emergents, the Church and the world are going to be better off for it.