The Ashes of Pentecost
I sometimes tell people that the church in which I was born, and lived until I was seventeen, was at the time a 'cult'. The label is perhaps half true. Which is to say (to pick a random highly-rated Google link), we met most of the signs listed in the www.ex-cult.org indicators list: Leader claimed special exclusive ministry, we believed we were the only true church, we used emotional intimidation including total shunning to keep members from leaving, (we had 'free-will love offerings' rather than compulsory tithing), we had little time to ourselves (seven meetings a week plus Saturday afternoon labour), massive control over private lives, all criticism seen as rebellion, 'informing' on dissidents encouraged through an informal secret reporting system. Yep, we were objectively pretty much up there.
(A miracle occurred later, as these things do, and the church restructured itself; it's now a fairly mainstream Pentecostal/Charismatic denomination).
However. The word 'cult' only carries half of a meaning. What we actually were was a splinter cell of a substream of the Pentecostal church movement in New Zealand: an isolated fragment of a divided subculture within a subculture, that had become frozen in time around the 1940s while even the fundamentalist Christian world moved on. And the story of that movement, what happened to it, and how we came to be who we were, is one that has been largely untold but one that grows increasingly fascinating to me the older I get.
My Pentecostal heritage - and I have not completely rejected it, nor do I plan to, because part of it was good - is the reason why I am interested in anomalous cognition and psychic powers, because the Pentecostal faith was built solidly on the existence of such things. The reason why new denominations formed in the first place was because phenomena were occurring that were beyond ordinary comprehension, and those who chose to practice those strange powers found themselves outside of the boundaries of discreet, safely materialist 'Churchianity'. Naturally they flocked together to escape persecution and create their own identity; unsurprisingly, they found or created strong leaders who would champion their cause while reassuring them that all was still well in God's heaven; sadly, these leaders very often abused their trust, manipulated their flock, and fought among themselves like trapped sewer rats.
In New Zealand, it seems, the very smallness of our country combined with the wideness of our ocean and our many competing overseas influences to bring us a Pentecostal Christian subculture that was riven with discord and factions within a few years from when it began, in 1922. Healing began to come in 1975, but even now in 2007 the church landscape remains fractured. But denominational walls now seem to be dissolving even as new battle lines are drawn.
My main source for history so far has been the excellent 1999 book by Brett Knowles, 'New Life: A History of the New Life Churches of New Zealand 1942-1979'. As one might expect, it focuses mainly on the New Life denomination, but the story around the edges gives some of the shape of what must have happened elsewhere.
There had been of course spiritual movements, awakenings, revivals for centuries. The period from 1850 on had been filled with Spiritualism, faith healers, millennial apocalyptic movements such as the Adventists. But the movement that became called 'Pentecost' is generally acknowledged to have begun on New Years Day 1901, at Bethel Bible College in Topeka, Kansas. The phenomenon of glossolalia, or 'speaking in tongues' started there. The second major event on the American axis was the Azusa Street Revival which began in 1906.
Meanwhile, it seems the 1904-1905 Welsh Revival had influenced the Anglican vicar Alexander Boddy, who travelled to Azusa after visiting Norwegian Methodist pastor T B Barrett. A global network had rapidly sprung up leading to at least two (American and British) streams of this new, and yet faction-ridden, religious movement.
The Yorkshire Methodist layman Smith Wigglesworth, a plumber by trade, visited Boddy in 1907 and began a hugely successful public career as a healing evangelist. It was Wigglesworth's visit to New Zealand in 1922-1924 which led to the creation of a Pentecostal denomination - the Pentecostal Church of New Zealand - and the chain of events which led to my particular faith.
The PCNZ, similarly to other groups elsewhere, seems to have had a huge capacity for splintering. The Apostolic Church (affiliated with the Welsh revival) was the first to defect, followed by the Assemblies of God (an offshoot from Azusa) in 1926, a large unnamed group in 1949 influenced by both Seattle's Bethel Temple and the Latter Rain movement - which was later to become the hugely influential Indigenous Pentecostal or New Life Churches - the Christian Revival Crusade at some point, and finally the remains of the PCNZ in 1953 affiliated with the Elim denomination (also affiliated with Wales). Each of these groups appears to have bitterly fought with the others for converts and over points of doctrine, but more often, over issues of church government: specifically, the ongoing tension between centralised control and decentralised individualism. These rifts were to continue through the Billy Graham and 'Full Gospel' evangelism crusades of the 1950s and 1960s, until the Charismatic movement of the late '60s and early '70s led to the legitimising of Pentecostal phenomena within established church structures and a new rapprochement within the warring Pentecostal world.
Within this rather claustrophobic New Zealand religious scene, the founders of my particular sect were some of the more extreme. At least one of them bought into the controversial British Israel race-doctrine (though not so controversial as all that - William Massey, Prime Minister of New Zealand, held to it), and it seems that they must have dropped out of fellowship with most of the other branches by at least the 1940s, possibly as early as the 1930s. This period was not much talked about, except in vague and veiled reminiscence as a time of lost glory. Our particular church was built after WW2, brick by second-hand brick, with donated labour from members. It still stands today, remodelled and updated but on the outside still... a monument to something. Faith, pride, sacrifice, hubris, warning, redemption, sanctuary: all of the above?
It is easy to empathise with multiple sides, reading accounts of these emotionally jarring times. By all accounts, the early Pentecostal pioneers had a hard row to hoe. They - most of them - were hot-blood battlers, outcast from the mainstream denominations for practising what they believed was the original, pure form of the Christian faith, 'with signs and wonders following'. And many of them did appear to work genuine miracles, sometimes easily and sometimes at great personal cost. Though it is hard to escape the feeling that many of those preachers also brought opposition upon themselves, in fact relished it. The Pentecostal preachers who quietly and wisely sidestepped division appear thinner on the page than those who launched 'great moves of God' amid great splash and fury.
It is harder, looking back, to separate the pain from the dream.
