Fundamentalist? Pentecostal?

A Shady Deal

10-19-22

Recently while passing the first church I ever called home (initials FC), I was surprised and dismayed to see sign out front that read "San Diego Christian College" (hereafter SDCC). So I quizzed my cousin who has attended FC forever and learned that the church hadn't gotten bought or otherwise usurped by SDCC but had entered into a deal whereby SDCC would use FC as an adjunct campus.

Though I'm aware that colleges often rent extra classrooms, I found this deal mighty disturbing as I knew the participants intimately. Pam and I spent four years teaching at what was then Christian Heritage College (CHC) and is now SDCC; and I attended FC once or twice each week for about ten years and wrote a long article for the San Diego Reader defending the church and its people in the aftermath of a scandal so famous that just yesterday, more than a  dozen  later, a documentary filmmaker interviewed me about it.

Here's why the partnership between FC and SDCC disturbs me:

FC is connected with the Assemblies of God (AOC) while SDCC may be connected, although they don't advertise the connection, to the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). At least SBC and SDCC are doctrinally in accord.

My first introduction to AOC was during high school through a friend whose parents belonged to one of their churches. I attended because, as my friend informed me, the people were crazy and therefore fun to watch. Besides, his sisters, who accompanied us, were lovely.

The AOG grew out of  a late 19th and early 20th century revival that was all about the experience of spiritual manifestations such as speaking in "tongues" (foreign or spiritual languages) and supernatural healing. This revival gave birth to the Pentecostal movement, Pentecost being the day the Holy Spirit first descended upon the nascent Christian church.

That movement gained astonishing momentum through the Azusa Street Mission in Los Angeles, where believers of all races were equally welcome, and where people from all over the world came to gather. To this day, an AOC priority is to introduce believers to the Holy Spirit.

My first exposure to Southern Baptists came on road trips through what we used to call the Bible Belt, while listening to fiery sermons on the radio.

Baptist history goes back to seventeenth century England. Reformers practiced baptism by immersion and called for strict accountability to Biblical teaching. Persecuted reformers introduced Baptist churches to America, where they became a popular denomination.

As the Civil War approached, northern Baptists asserted that God would not condone treating one race as superior to another, while southerners argued that God intended for races to be separate. The northern faction, declaring that a person could not be a missionary and hold slaves, stopped sending money south. Which, during 1845, prompted  the organization of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC).

In case these brief histories don't clarify the distinction between AOG and SBC, I will summarize by noting my perspective: The AOG mission is to encourage people to experience God; The SBC mission is to subject believers to its interpretation of traditional doctrine, which often (as at SDCC) includes the insistence on Biblical literalism.

Biblical literalism means that every word, and every story, of the Bible must be understood as strictly literal. God created heaven and earth in one literal day, as we measure time. A literal serpent appeared to Eve and convinced her to eat some literal fruit and thereby infected all us with our sinful natures. 

SDCC's advocacy of  Biblical literalism is expressed most clearly by the college's sponsorship of the Creation Research Institute, whose website assures us that: "Many different measurable processes — from blue stars, Saturn’s heat, and Earth’s magnetic field to radiocarbon in coal, diamond, and fossils — confirm a biblical age of the universe of thousands, not billions, of years . . ."

Now, please understand, I don't object to anti-evolutionists or anyone else believing they should take every world of the Bible literally. My objection is to a church or its leaders promising that those who don't adhere to that church or denomination's particular belief will spend eternity in a fiery hell; and at least several students of mine at the college that is now SDCC were confronted by faculty with that dread promise.

I'm deeply bothered that people in the "world" learn about what I'll call the SBC doctrine and apply it to all Christians, which so taints the faith that far too many people, expecially those who consider themselves educated, won't even bother to read Christ's message. Which is why I am so dismayed about FC partnering with SDCC that I emailed a friend and pastor whose wisdom was my reason for spending many happy and valuable years at FC.

I wrote: "The partnership worries me because I feel all sorts of evangelicals are falling into the SBC trap and becoming more and more what the secular world already tends to think all of us Christians are, which is rigid, judgmental followers of an obsolete religion."

He replied: "I sure understand your concern. . . . When they [creationists] are done with their arguments, the reality of God is no longer dependent on the awe of a God so much bigger than we are. Instead, God's reality becomes dependent on whether or not we believe in their narrow view of creation."

I replied: "Yep. And it's getting harder and harder to distinguish a Southern Baptist from a Pentecostal or either of them from Alex Jones."

And he replied: "Right. So much of the world is being pushed to extremes and narratives that are fueled by hostility. I pray the true Spirit of Christ will gain traction." 

Amen.