John Allen's "The Future Church": The Pentecostalism Trend

Over the past two months, the members of the Mirror of Justice have taken turns exploring John Allen's important new book titled “The Future Church.” For each of the ten trends in the modern Catholic Church identified by Allen, one member of the Mirror of Justice has posted a synopsis and commentary, as the start of a discussion thread. This is another in that series. [Note that numbers inside parentheses below are references to pages in the hard-back version of the book.]

Pentecostalism is the tenth trend identified by John Allen as affecting the Catholic Church in his book, “The Future Church.” As Allen explains, “‘Pentecostalism’ refers to a movement within Christianity emphasizing direct personal experience of God through the ‘baptism of the Holy Spirit,’ which often, though not always, is believed to produce spiritual gifts such as healings, visions, and speaking in tongues” (377). As Allen writes, “the motor force of the movement is the conviction that the eruption of the Holy Spirit associated with the Feast of Pentecost in the New Testament did not stop with the close of the biblical era” (380).

Allen reports the rapid global growth of Pentecostalism. “When future histories of Christianity are written,” Allen predicts, “the late twentieth century will probably be known as the era of the ‘Pentecostal Explosion.’ From less than 6 percent in the mid-1970s, Pentecostals finished the century representing almost 20 percent of world Christianity . . . .” (378).

In many parts of the world, and Latin American in particular, “the Pentecostal wave” has resulted in losses of millions from the Catholic Church (386). “On the other hand,” Allen writes, “the news is not all bad for the Catholic Church. While Pentecostalism eats away at the raw numbers of Catholics, sometimes it can be an index of religious ferment that, in the long run, may also benefit Catholicism” (387). As Allen describes the thinking of Dominican Father Edward Cleary, in the wake of Pentecostalism, “Catholicism is also becoming more dynamic in Latin America, generating higher levels of commitment among those who remain” (387).

Among the members of the Mirror of Justice, I may be one of the better suited to offer some personal comments on this particular trend. Converted to Pentecostalism in college, I was an active member of the movement for nearly a decade, including being married to my wife in an Assembly of God church. I fondly remember those years as involving some of the most powerful spiritual experiences of my life, many having a more enthusiastic emotional impact than what I have experienced during what is now a similar number of years as a Catholic. Both the kind of person I have become and the Christian faith that I possess owe much to my Pentecostal years. But where Pentecostalism spoke to and stirred my heart, the teachings, history, traditions, liturgy, and centuries of public engagement and natural law reasoning found in the Catholic Church spoke to and stimulated my mind.

While little can compete with a Pentecostal worship service for arousing the soul and bringing a sense of a deep personal connection to Jesus, the Catholic Church has no true competitor for conveying the majesty of God and the beauty of the Kingdom of Heaven. While a daily walk with Jesus may come more easily with a Pentecostal soul, the Catholic Church with the Deposit of the Faith left to the Apostles and the intellectual tradition cultivated by the Doctors of the Church have no parallel in equipping the believer with a fuller understanding of both the substance of our Faith and the manner in which a Christian should live in the world.

In sum, the Catholic Church needs Pentecostalism to play the heart strings and enhance a personal spiritual life, but Pentecostalism needs the Catholic Church to provide a direct line to the Apostolic tradition, to provide doctrinal structure, to draw upon a centuries-old tradition of inspired and wise Christian teaching, and to give Christians an intellectual grounding for the use of God-given reason in conjunction with a well-formed conscience.

As do other former Pentecostals (and I think many former Evangelicals as well) who have converted to the Catholic Church, I sometimes find the emphasis on a personal relationship with Jesus to be missing in Catholic parish life. While knowing Jesus as a personal Savior is integral to Catholic doctrine and manifested in the Sacraments, especially the Sacrament of Reconciliation, the one-on-one relationship with our Lord is not always well conveyed in the Catholic Church. I know that many of us from Pentecostal or Evangelical backgrounds worry that the deep and individual spiritual connection ― the personal sense of walking with Jesus ― may not be fully experienced by our children, at least those who find themselves in the sometimes stale or routine style of worship found in too many Catholic parishes.

In the “Future of the Church,” John Allen paraphrases India’s Father Paul Parathazham as saying that too many Catholics have never had a “God experience,” “meaning something that got the heart pumping and put them into direct contact with the supernatural realm” (393). As the Latin American bishops acknowledged in 2007, the Catholic Church has in some ways been put to sleep, “leaving it content with the formal externals of religion but often failing to impart any real sense of personal faith” (403).

In sum, the Catholic Church needs to be touched and inspired by the Pentecostal movement. While the evangelical turn in the Catholic Church, discussed elsewhere in John Allen’s book, together with a fervent and personally dedicated new generation of priests and lay-leaders inspired by John Paul II has started the necessary spiritual renewal in the Church, the Pentecostal spark may keep the spiritual fires burning.

At the same time, the Pentecostal movement is incomplete apart from the Catholic Church. Allen refers to the writings of Kathleen Galvas, a convert to the Catholic Church from the Assemblies of God, in which she well explains that “Catholicism’s capacity to root faith in both sentiment and reason is ultimately a more satisfactory bulwark” against those “moments of spiritual aridity or doubt” that afflict all Christians (399). Allen further cites Galvas as questioning “claims by Pentecostals to do away with the need for clergy intermediaries by insisting that each believer can be directly illuminated by Scripture turns out to be hollow” (399). In fact, Pentecostal worship groups and communities tend to revolve around certain charismatic (pun intended) leaders whose teachings may become nearly infallible, in practice if not in theory.

Because no cohesive community that hopes to share a coherent message can continue by allowing full rein to each person’s own independent visions, the danger of spiritual chaos will be averted, if at all, by accepting the superior understanding and mature spiritual connection of elders in the faith. Claims of revelation must always be tested against the experience and traditions of the community, which in the case of the Catholic Church have been passed down through the Deposit of the Faith from the early days of the Church. In the end, there is no substitute, in terms of both practical necessity and the confirmation of Christ’s own example, to the Apostolic Succession.

Another downside to the growth of Pentecostalism articulated by John Allen raises the question of its staying power in the lives of its converts. “While public fascination surrounds the spectacular number of entries into Pentecostalism,” Allen warns, “there hasn't been as much attention to what some experts say is an equally remarkable number of exits” (380). “For a significant percentage of new converts, Pentecostalism may be a way station between nominal membership in a traditional church and a complete lack of religious affiliation . . . .” (380).

The very things that make Pentecostalism as a separate denomination so attractive at first ― a deeply personal experience, an informal worship setting, and the apparent lack of strong traditions and a clear leadership structure ― also limit its ability to remain vibrant when members move beyond the initial emotional experience and seek continuing nourishment, for the mind as well as the heart. By wedding the Pentecostal experience to the venerable traditions and Petrine structure of the Catholic Church, the Christian is fed both emotionally and intellectually.

Although “hostility to Catholicism is a real current in some Pentecostal thought” (382), the compatibility of the Charismatic gifts of the Holy Spirit and the traditions and teachings of the Catholic Church are becoming more apparent to those both inside and outside the formal Church. The essence of the Pentecostal message should be at home in the Catholic Church.

In fact, as Allen observes, Charismatic Catholics may now constitute 11 percent of the Church’s faithful (384). In the United States, “with Hispanic Catholics nearly five times more likely to take part in charismatic activities,” Allen quotes a national Hispanic Christian leader as saying that, in America, “'[t]here are more Catholic Pentecostals than Pentecostal Pentecostals'” (384). Allen notes that “[m]any Catholic leaders have supported the Charismatic movement in the Church, seeing in it a means to promote deeper faith and practice” (385). And well they should. At the same time, Catholic leaders properly insist that charismatic activities must not supplant the Sacraments (386).

As another point of vital importance to the future of any people of faith, Allen emphasizes that “[o]ne of the great strengths of Pentecostalism is its capacity to form a sense of community” (407). With the decline of ethnic neighborhoods and geographically-centered parishes, the Catholic Church must foster stronger communities of deeply shared Catholic meaning and spiritual experience, such as sub-groups within a parish that come together for Bible study and to share one another’s burdens. We must find ways, both within and outside the parish, in which to build community and demonstrate our concern for the welfare of each brother and sister in Christ.

In this respect, there is a crucial role for Catholic legal education, in building true communities of faculties and students with a shared mission. In addition to equipping our students with a superior legal education and affirming their integration of faith and profession, we should serve as continuing support centers for graduates, students, and friends, a place where they can always return for further nourishment and for strength when they are weary.

Greg Sisk