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When a Man’s Dream Is an Organization’s Nightmare An Open Letter to Bishop Arthur Brazier November 12, 2007 By Marlon Millner
“In the last days, God says, I will pour out my Spirit on all people. ... your old men will dream dreams” (Acts 2:17, NIV).
I was deeply saddened to read “Bishop Brazier Leaves PAW” in the Chicago Defender on October 11, 2007 that you intend to end your more than 50 years of fellowship with the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World (PAW).
To the average reader of the Defender, the internal theological squabbles of any religious group remains marginal to why people seek faith in the first place or Christian faith in particular and the Pentecostal faith specifically. It is because we live in what many scholars rightly call a post-denominational age that I write you openly and hope to share with readers the broader loss to Pentecostal organizations, like the PAW, when churches like Apostolic Church of God pull out.
Azusa Truth in the Library As a third-generation Apostolic Pentecostal who has served and worked in many Christian faith communities (Baptist, Church of God in Christ, and Anglican), I felt a calling in my freshman year at Morehouse College in Atlanta to not only experience Pentecostalism, but to study it as well. And the PAW was central to both of those pursuits.
During my freshman year, though I had been raised the son and grandson of Apostolic Pentecostal preachers, it was only after attending the PAW Mid-Winter convention in Atlanta that I experienced the hallmark of Pentecostalism—the baptism in the Holy Spirit. But another unusual event occurred that year.
During my time in the college library, I started to search for every book in the library that had something to do with Pentecostalism. It was then I learned of William Joseph Seymour—the pioneer and African-American leader of the Azusa Street revival from which Pentecostalism became popular in the 20th century. I learned about Garfield T. Haywood, the first African-American leader of the PAW, which from its beginnings was interracial.
I also discovered an obscure book called Black Self Determination. That book was written by you. I was taken aback that a Pentecostal preacher—and an Apostolic Pentecostal preacher in particular—had so powerfully addressed the social condition of African-Americans during the height of the modern civil rights movement.
My interest only deepened when I got a summer job after my freshman year working in the editorial library of The Chicago Tribune. I began to pour over old newspaper files about you—your work with Martin Luther King, Jr.; your outspoken and controversial outreach to and work with gangs in Chicago, such as the Black Stone Rangers; your collaboration with the Industrial Areas Foundation to create what is now known as The Woodlawn Organization.
You were no typical or ordinary black preacher or Apostolic Pentecostal. However, you were in a sphere of several prominent black Apostolic Pentecostals—like Robert McMurray in Los Angeles, Robert Lawson in New York, and Smallwood Williams in Washington, D.C.—who pastored large Apostolic Pentecostal churches and engaged across Christian and other social lines to work for positive change, peace, and justice in communities of color and around the world.
Theological Reflection and Social Work However, like them, your political and social work often outstripped your theological reflection. Your discovery of certain ideas from the Protestant Reformation about the salvation status of a believer were new for many in Apostolic Pentecostal circles, but not nearly as progressive and forward-thinking as your work for community transformation.
You would not remember this, but I recall with disappointment when I reached out to you by letter, as an eager Apostolic Pentecostal trying to blend the spiritual and critical in college, and you referred me to materials from Moody Bible Institute. That was a far cry from the McCormick Theological Seminary, or the University of Chicago Divinity School. And it certainly could not be further from The Divinity School at Harvard University, where I would earn a master of divinity years later.
Many were shocked to learn that I, as an Apostolic Pentecostal, would attend Harvard for theological studies. Harvard certainly is religiously liberal and plural. However, Harvard Divinity School was the same place that in 1984 held the only scholarly conference on Apostolic Pentecostalism ever held at a major university in North America.
My experiences in following your ministry and the others led me to believe that being progressive is far more than interacting with non-Apostolic Pentecostal Christians, or inviting them to preach in a denomination’s annual meeting.
Bishop Brazier, the Church of God in Christ invited Robert Lawson to address its annual meeting in 1945 because Lawson and Charles Mason were personal friends. But they clearly did not agree on issues of doctrine. And who can say the last time that an Apostolic Pentecostal has ever preached in Memphis, the headquarters city of COGIC?
Consider your colleague in Chicago, Rev. Dr. Stephen Thurston. He may have all types of preachers come to New Covenant Missionary Baptist Church and preach, but, when the annual session of the National Baptist Convention of America takes place, the preachers reflect the denomination and rightly so.
Market-driven Spirituality The problem with a post-denominational age and a mega-ministry, televangelism model is that national and international gatherings of like-minded people who share a common history, faith, and practice are set-aside for the commercialization of Christianity, which leads to personality-driven, popularity-focused events, where there are no unifying ideas, just market-driven forces. It is this context that has created a crisis of meaning for PAW, which causes you to want to open the convention pulpit up, and for others to desire it be entirely closed.
This post-denominational age, which has given birth to “full gospel” Baptists, and “neo-Pentecostal” African Methodist Episcopalians, and even “charismatic” Anglicans and Catholics, is a good thing if we focus on the broad dimensions of the Pentecostal experience, and how it always undermines our social and political constructions of the church—as was the case in the book of Acts in the Bible. This is also the case in Chicago, if you believe religious historian and Princeton professor Wallace Best, who in his book Passionately Human, No Less Divine; Religion and Culture in Black Chicago from 1915 to 1952, argues for the “pentecostalization” of churches in the Windy City through the growth of gospel music and the migration of rural black Christianity into an urban context.
However, the movement of the Spirit is not market-driven spirituality, which is highly ahistorical, anti-critical, non-reflective, and disparaging of tradition. Rather than renewing a movement, these market forces can cause schism, just as the “new issue” of Jesus-name baptism did in 1914, eight years after Azusa Street. Apostolic Pentecostals were birthed in an attempt to radically reform and renew the church, not to reject it.
Choosing To Leave the Organization While I know the struggle has been long and hard to be different in the PAW, you perhaps have not been different enough, in that you would now go the way of being independent, rather than still be a force of change to be reckoned with, a father and mentor of a new generation of ministry, and someone programmatically instituting progressive Apostolic Pentecostalism theologically, politically, and socially in the context of your lifelong denomination.
If Episcopalians have not split over blessing same-sex unions, and ordaining gay bishops (though some have left), why should you leave and PAW possibly split along the lines of those who want to rightly celebrate Apostolic Pentecostal and PAW identity and those who rightly want to be ecumenical, interdenominational, and intentionally inclusive?
Leaving really means you can no longer mentor a new generation of leadership in the denomination. Like so many African-American leaders, you become a lone ranger, a religious Don Quixote, with a mission limited to one. People gather around you because of who you are, rather than the program, the mission, the purpose you could possibly represent.
I actually think everyone in the PAW could probably use more sophisticated and critical theological education, even of an Evangelical or Pentecostal variety. Pentecostals don’t just make good music or preach on television today. They have also created accredited schools, created academic societies, and written theological books and journals of the highest scholarly order (and I’m not just talking about the latest material from United Pentecostal Church scholar David Bernard).
Theologically Cosmopolitan I think you and PAW would do well to consider the points Bishop Morris Golder said the denomination needed to reflect on, when in 1973 he published the history of the organization. He then said the organization needed to study broader Christian theology and history. But Golder was trained in religion with a graduate degree from a major university. He was not just socially and politically conscious. He was also theologically cosmopolitan.
Being theologically cosmopolitan is not inviting Baptist or COGIC preachers to the PAW convention. It is what Bishop Smallwood Williams had in mind when in his 1981 autobiography, This is My Story; a Significant Life Struggle, he wrote:
“I made a lot of Pentecostals uncomfortable. I never purposely set out to be unpleasant, but my emphasis on pragmatic preaching was leading me to get involved in areas where few in my church had ventured. Under my leadership in the late fifties and sixties … members of Bibleway were getting involved in places that didn’t make us particularly popular with some Pentecostals -- Christian unity and cooperation … I had the ability … to see beyond denominational differences and religious prejudices to apply Pentecostal theology to practical areas of living. That gift of mine wasn’t particularly appreciated. No doubt many Pentecostals, like many Christians in many other denominations, were threatened when they took a step outside their own door. This is true to this day, despite all the talk of the ecumenical movement.”
Being theologically cosmopolitan is the work you have done with The Woodlawn Organization and the partnership the PAW has forged with World Vision to meet human needs in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. Being theologically cosmopolitan is finding progressive and prophetic reasons for partnership and fellowship with those with whom you might doctrinally disagree in the hopes of building bridges and better representing the kingdom of God.
The PAW, despite the theological exclusivism and sectarianism of some, has many bridge-building elements of its history, upon which you and others should be building. The legacy of radical reformation in Christian doctrine and practice is worth emulating, and not merely celebrating as completed practice of restoration. The heritage of affirming and ordaining women in ministry and to the pastorate should be celebrated and expanded. The history of interracial fellowship in a hostile, racist society, should be retained and renewed for a multicultural America, where others like Hispanics are the new face of ethnic America.
The way in which African-American Apostolic Pentecostal leaders were well-read (though not formally trained), politically engaged, interested in Africa, and conversant in the issues of the day is nothing more than a firm foundation upon which everyone in PAW could build.
Perhaps you have tried to affirm and expand all of these things in PAW down through the years, and you simply got tired, frustrated, and fed up. Nevertheless, I am disappointed.
The Answer is Simple What PAW needs is not a market-driven, personality-focused national meeting with celebrity preachers (both in and outside of PAW) to draw people—it needs new, renewed vision and focus on its own identity and purpose, an identity and purpose around which a new generation of Apostolic Pentecostals can gather and celebrate. Both sides of this petty, useless conflict need to be challenged about how to build unity without uniformity.
It is still Jesus’ prayer that we be one. And we are still called to build up people for works of service, and that should be our focus because in such building we shall come into the unity of the faith.
Sincerely,
Rev. Marlon Millner
ninetyandnine.com
© 2007, Marlon Millner
---------- Marlon Millner is a third-generation Apostolic Pentecostal, who is ordained or licensed in both Pentecostal and Baptist traditions. He is a co-founder of the Pentecostal Charismatic Peace Fellowship and lives outside of Philadelphia. He attended his first PAW convention when he was 16 years old. He considers the late Bishop Smallwood E. Williams of Bibleway Church his model, and the late Bishop Ithiel Clemmons of the Church of God in Christ his mentor.
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