But
Oneness worship itself, after its first decade, also fell into the pattern of
formalizing Pentecostal worship, although the doctrinal distinctives of the movement
left a peculiarly Oneness mark on these routinized worship forms. Contemporary
Oneness worship follows the normal pattern of Pentecostal life. The Oneness
believer structures his life—most specifically, his social and religious life—around
the regular worship services of his congregation. The believer dedicates a
substantial portion of time during the week to regular and special services: active
members of the congregation attend all regular services, whereas the less
committed develop their own pattern of attendance. Oneness congregations
usually offer five basic weekly activities: Sunday school, Sunday morning worship
service, Sunday evening evangelistic service, a midweek Bible training session,
and a midweek prayer meeting. (In many cases, Oneness churches combine the Bible
study and prayer meeting into a single midweek service usually held on
Wednesday night.)11
Like
all Pentecostal worship, Oneness services provide an opportunity for the
believer to personally and actively participate in the church's life through
corporate music, prayer, testimony, and affirmation of the preached Word. The
supernatural is viewed as latent in every service, ready to interrupt the
normal order with a "divine invasion." There exists a "constant
intersection" between the natural and supernatural in the Pentecostal
service along with a "constant susceptibility" of the natural being swallowed
up by the supernatural.12 For the Pentecostal, especially the
Oneness believer, the divine is more than just an object of worship, it is also
the subject of action within community worship.
To
be sure, the non-Pentecostal feels that the divine acts and speaks in a special
way through the preached Word of the ordained minister, and perhaps even in a
general way in the hearing, confession, prayer, and sung praise of the congregation.
The Pentecostal, however, feels that the divine speaks throughout the entire
service in a special way through—at different times, in different manners, and
by different persons—the entire congregation. The result is the Pentecostal
congregation's feeling that heaven is open not only in the preacher's proclamation
but in the assembly's participation.13
Oneness
Pentecostal worship is corporate in its performance and results. All elements
of Oneness worship as well as the formalized order of worship within which these
elements appear are ultimately community expressions. Community participation
in these elements and this order evokes the moment of "divine
epiphany"—the explosive "real presence" of Christ within the
congregation which converts the uninitiated and renews the believer. Pentecostal
services offer several elements absent from other evangelical expressions:
concert prayers and songs, spontaneous testimonies, demonstrative acts of
worship14 (including hand- clapping, shouting, and dancing), public
exercise of spiritual gifts, and the extended "after service."
Oneness
Pentecostals engage in public prayer and hymn singing with pronounced
enthusiasm. Both prayer and singing are community experiences which create an atmosphere
for later evangelistic appeals. During the prayer service, each congregation member
prays aloud, vocalizing requests and praises. Such concert prayers often border
on ecstasy, evoking extended periods of spontaneous worship. Such extended
prayer services, although potential at any point in the service, usually occur
only during the after service following the altar appeal when the congregation
unites in prayer for the salvation of the unconverted. Similarly, Oneness
Pentecostal song services elicit the full participation of the congregation. Loud,
animated music, usually provided by an amateur church orchestra, accompanies a
variety of hymns and choruses. These songs tend to be repetitive and the choruses
are sung numerous times. More often than not, the lyrics of these songs focus
on the joy of conversion, a comparison of present salvation with past
sinfulness, and the efficacy of the presence of Christ to save—thus, arousing
the congregation to worship and expectancy of a manifestation of God's saving
action. Occasionally, songs concerning specific doctrinal distinctives or the
superiority of the Oneness claim are sung. While these songs are in the
minority, their frequent use is significant. Like prayer, Oneness singing often
borders on ecstasy and may be accompanied by clapping, raised hands, and even
more demonstrative physical actions such as shouting, dancing, or running. A
skilled song-leader will allow the congregation to spontaneously respond for a
while or to a certain limit and then carefully reassert his leadership role.15
Pentecostal
worship also encourages personal testimonies—public sharing of individual
experiences as praises to God and for the edification of the entire congregation.
Although sometimes spontaneously interrupting the given order of worship,
testimonies are usually limited to a designated portion of the service. These voluntary
expressions of praise often center upon personal spiritual dilemmas, answered
prayers, healings, or conversion. Testimonies tend to follow a three-step pattern:
an initial word of praise to God, a recounting of various blessings for which
the speaker is thankful (most often cast in a "before/after" mold
emphasizing the troubles of sinfulness and the blessings of salvation), and a
fairly standardized conclusion (usually requesting continued prayers from the
congregation).16 Oneness testimonies also reveal perceptions of
opposition and hostility from the secular world and historic Christendom. Against
this "hostility," these speakers often vindicate the Oneness message
as "the truth" or "full truth" in contrast to the limited,
insufficient understanding of the "false" Christian groups. As a
whole, the testimony service provides a stage for public confession and catharsis
in which the most personal problems are shared. This results, more often than
not, in real, observable encouragement from the congregation and points to the availability
of similar saving action for the unconverted.
Pentecostal
services often progress through a series of moments of ecstatic worship and
subsequent "cooling down" as the pastor or devotional leader
reasserts control. These ecstatic moments, which normally build to the
crescendo of the "divine epiphany" in the after service, produce
demonstrative physical manifestations in the congregation such as dancing,
shouting, exuberant singing, falling into trances, and prostration. Such
manifestations, whether contrived, conditioned, or truly spontaneous, are
uniformly interpreted as human response to the "real presence" of God
in the worship. This overwhelmed state in which normal inhibitions and behavior
patterns are suspended often borders on chaos if not carefully managed by a
leader skilled in directing such corporate displays of emotion. Interestingly,
the desire to prolong the intensity of this ecstasy is evident in the Pentecostal
description of heaven as a place of uninterrupted worship, unending ecstasy in
the presence of God. The degree of participation in these times of ecstatic worship
directly measures the individual's position within the community. Degrees of
surrender, hesitancy, and unease emerge within the congregation during these
extremes of worship. Such ecstatic worship "heats up" congregational pressure
on the unconverted to respond to God's available presence and salvation. Not
surprisingly, the more extreme physical manifestations occur during the after
service.
From
the earliest revivals, Pentecostal worship has encouraged free, regular
exercise of spiritual gifts in the congregation. These gifts—delineated in I
Corinthians 12-14 as direct, specific acts of the living Lord by the power of
the Holy Spirit in the church body—operate as spiritual tokens or signs which
arrest the attention of the unbeliever and vindicate Pentecostal worship as the
arena of divine action. This is especially true of the more visible and striking
gifts: healing, tongues and interpretation, and prophecy. Through these
spiritual operations, an atmosphere of the miraculous arises which invests the
message and worship with an aura of divine presence and authority.17
The
public use of the gifts has undergone a clear evolution in the movement's
maturing years. These gifts, rather than a formal sermon, provided the most
direct "word" from God during the earliest revivals. Although the sermon
came to usurp this role in the early denominational years, ample room for such
manifestations remained within the growing framework of the service. Over time, the order of the service has become so fixed that operation of the gifts is
normally restricted to times of corporate prayer and singing and during the demonstrative
worship of the after service. This is especially true in "performance- oriented"
churches in which a spontaneous interjection of spiritual gifts disrupts,
rather than accents, the program of worship.18
Classical Pentecostals
understand glossolalia, tongue- speaking, as an inspiration of the Spirit
empowering the believer to supernaturally speak in a language he does not know.
Viewed as the tangible evidence of Spirit baptism, glossolalia occupies the
central place in Pentecostal thought and corporate worship. Pentecostals
explain tongue-speaking—in the language of dispensational premillennialism—as
God's unique gift for the church age. (All other spiritual manifestations, including
the other gifts listed in I Corinthians 12, were already experienced in Old
Testament times.) When this notion is wedded to the Pentecostal scenario of end
time restoration of primitive Christianity, tongues are celebrated as God's
special gift for the latter-day church. Rejection of glossolalia is, therefore,
rejection of the express will of God in the present world.19
Tongue-speaking
plays three distinct roles in Pentecostal worship and life. Although in each
case the tongues experience takes the same form, the purpose and results
differ. First, tongue-speaking is seen as an evidence of Spirit baptism, the
divine confirmation of the initial infilling of the believer. Second, tongues
are used in private prayer for personal edification. Tongues as a "prayer
language" involves a transcendent level of communion between the human and
divine and results in the enrichment of the individual believer. Third, speaking
in tongues, along with the complementary gift of interpretation of tongues,
provides a prophetic message for the congregation, a message from God which
edifies the believers and convicts the unbelievers. These messages usually
involve a proclamation about the church's future, a promise of God concerning
the church's present, or an admonition concerning sin or improper behavior
within the community.20 In each case, tongue-speaking functions as
the key spiritual gift through which God speaks to his people and they respond
to his presence. Glossolalia validates, not only the believer's initial Spirit
baptism, but also the on-going authority of spiritual worship.
The
gift of prophecy parallels the third function of glossolalia. Whereas the
"message" of tongues is expounded to the congregation through the
gift of interpretation, prophecy provides a more direct communication from God.
When prompted by the Spirit, the prophet speaks in sentences and phrases in the
vernacular—often in biblically sounding language—which communicate a divine exhortation
usually cast in eschatological overtones. In present forms of Pentecostal
worship, such utterances serve to support, rather than supplant, the formal
sermon. Through the gifts of utterance—tongues, interpretation, and prophecy—the
proclaimed message of God's readiness to save is confirmed in the worshipping
community.21
--------------------------------------------
11Compare this weekly
schedule with the typical schedule of black Pentecostal churches discussed in
Paris, Black Pentecostalism, pp.
49-53.
12Bruner, Theology of the Holy Spirit, pp. 132-
36.
13Ibid., p. 137.
14See Ranaghan, "Rites
of Initiation," p. 250 for a similar evaluation of the distinctives of
Pentecostal worship.
15See Bruner, Theology of the Holy Spirit, pp. 133-34;
Masserano, "A Study of the Worship Forms," p. 72; Paris, Black Pentecostalism, pp. 71-79; and
Rooth, "Social Structure," pp. 83-85.
16Paris, Black Pentecostalism, pp. 58-61. See also
Bruner, Theology of the Holy Spirit,
p. 135 and Rooth, "Social Structure," pp. 85-86.
17Bruner, Theology of the Holy Spirit, pp. 139-40 and
Masserano, "A Study of the Worship Forms," p. 73.
18Ranaghan, "Rites
of Initiation," pp. 251-54.
19Bruner, Theology of the Holy Spirit, p. 143.
20Bruner, Theology of the Holy Spirit, pp. 142-48 and
Ranaghan, "Rites of Initiation," pp. 255-56.
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