No Longer Pentecostal
The
Sarah Vowell Interview
Aired
4/20/00 on Fresh AirÒ
Reviewed by David G. Kuhtenia
June 26, 2000
To understand how the church looks, smells, and
sounds to those outside the church can be difficult for those of us who were
born into Apostolic families and/or have stayed within the church, and/or have
been in a long-time, serious relationship with Jesus Christ.
As such, to come across a professional communicator who is willing to
talk about leaving the “Pentecostal church” in a non-defensive manner is
quite intriguing and informative.
One recent example is an interview of Sarah Vowell
aired on the National Public Radio program Fresh
AirÒ. Vowell (can that possibly be her real name?!) is a
Contributing Editor to another public radio program called This American Life and was on Fresh
AirÒ to promote a book of essays that she had just published.
While I have only heard a couple of Sarah Vowell’s
public radio essays previous to the April interview, she comes across as bright,
articulate, and a lot more straightforward than the usual quasi-intellectual
politicized pop culture psycho-babble that seems to make up much of public
radio.
Evidently, Sarah grew up in a Pentecostal household
of some type in Oklahoma, and later moved with her family to Montana, where she
eventually went to college. The
upshot of her spiritual story is that she left the church when she was 16 years
old, and, in her words, the experience has left “a hole that’s still
there.”
While the fact that someone has left the church as a
teenager is not unique, hearing them recount some of the reasons why they left,
and their attempts to reconcile basic instinctual truths with their adopted
secular mindset is fascinating. In
this case, the story seems largely devoid of personal animosity towards her
former spiritual life, yet points out several reasons that made her question¾and ultimately leave¾the faith she had practiced as a younger
person.
Many of her difficulties seem to center on
inconsistencies within the local Pentecostal culture, the inability of people to
actually live the Christian life they professed, and emotional identification
with those who had made mistakes and were dealing with the potential
consequences. She does, however,
seem to maintain a real respect for those who remain true believers in the
things she left behind, although she also does not indicate any desire to
re-embrace those beliefs.
While most of us could readily answer the issues she
raises to our satisfaction, the
combined weight of these uncertainties ultimately led her to walk away from a
relationship with God. This is the
important theme in this interview¾we
understand that God is perfect and people are not, and that our “religious”
inconsistencies are human-centered, not God-centered.
These apparent inconsistencies, however, can be authentic problems to
those who can only see the corporate “us,” and not God.
When communicating with those on the outside of our
world about the extraordinary spiritual reality that we have found, we need all
of the glimpses that we can gather into why there can be a real hesitation to
give Jesus a closer look. This
interview provides a few of these glimpses and is definitely worth checking out
sometime when browsing the web. The
April 20, 2000 program is archived and can be listened to by setting your web
audio player to http://whyy.org/rameta/FA/FA20000420_40.ram. Forward to about
the 17th minute of the file if you want to get right into the church
portion of the interview.
The bottom line?
The more we understand how we can better communicate the Good News to
non-believers, the more effective our implementation of Matthew 28:18-20 will
be. It also might not hurt if we
can fix up a few of those cultural inconsistencies in our own lives along the
way!
ninetyandnine.com
ã
2000, David Kuhtenia
--------
David
Kuhtenia is the North American Coordinator for Campus Ministry
International part of the time, and is a consulting engineer to the nuclear
power industry the other part of the time. He and his wife, Michelle, live in
the Columbus, Ohio area with their mutt Jasmine, who seems to have aged almost
seven years since they got her last summer.
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