From the Rubble of a Church Rises a Spirit of Love

COLUMBUS, Miss. -- At the First Pentecostal Church on Tuscaloosa Road, the last Saturday of February was a day filled with supposed-to-be's.

Little Jereson McCool was supposed to be at the church hall surrounded by 60 members of his family and community to celebrate his fifth birthday, but his grandma's train from South Carolina was running five hours late. His mom, Misty, made the call from the train station to the church's Pastor Steve Blaylock to see whether they could move it to the next day.

Tom and Betty Lindsay, an elderly couple who live by the river, were supposed to hole up in a residence located in the church because of pending flooding, but Betty's sister insisted instead that they stay at her home 20 miles away.

The mother-daughter cleaning crew that was supposed to be cleaning the sanctuary of the church for the big baptismal service that was planned for the next day decided at the last minute to just go do it early in the morning.

These last-minute changes to plans proved to be lifesavers. A tornado -- one of nine that ravaged parts of Alabama, Georgia and here in Mississippi -- destroyed the very church building they would have been in, ripping off the roof and collapsing the walls. A few untouched pews remained as a reminder that a house of God once stood there.

"Even in the midst of all that destruction, there was so many miracles, things that just are unexplainable that happened, that only God could cause," said Blaylock.

The pastor's voice cracked as he considered the lives that would have been lost. When he drove up the road and saw the structural devastation of his church, he felt profound gratitude that none of those people who were supposed to be there were there.

The violent tornado leveled 300 homes, closed down the local school and cost one person her life. It also brought the community and strangers together the next morning to begin rebuilding the structure and renewing faith.

"As we were trying Saturday evening to get anything out of the Sanctuary that we could recover, we started talking about what are we gonna do about church tomorrow," Blaylock said. "So I started asking you know, maybe we oughta wait until another Sunday to do our Baptismal service rather than the next day. One particular man, Blake Brown, told us that if there's any way possible, I still wanna get baptized. He was new to our church, and boy, that just excited me and everybody else. We're like, we'll make it happen. We'll make it happen, if we have to go to the river or whatever we do, we'll make it happen."

So they did. The miraculous thing was that people came. People came from their church, and locals who didn't belong to the church came. Strangers who just happened to hear about what happened came.

"Obviously, we have been a greater light in our community than what we realize," Blaylock said.

First Pentecostal, unlike some Southern Pentecostal churches, is not divided by race. Both blacks and whites practice in a town whose population is 63 percent black and 35 percent white.

"There are so many forces in our world that divide people," Blaylock said. "But to see the community in our area, we are a mixed community. We have Hispanics, we have Native Americans, we have blacks, we have white, we have mixes of all kinds. But everybody, everybody was out helping each other."

He added, "Nobody asked what political party that you supported while we were out there Saturday night and Sunday. Nobody cared who was beside them, they were just thankful that they were there, and that they were helping, and they expressed love."

That Sunday morning, the day after the tornado hit, a total of nine people were baptized in an outdoor service using a borrowed baptism tank. Two hundred attendees sat in folding chairs surrounded by jagged lumber. Two hundred people showed up to dig them out so they could have their service.

Even the local Lowe's showed up with a flatbed, bottles of water and dozens of work gloves to lend a hand.

Blacklock said, "Our motto before the storm was, 'Loving God and Loving People.' And now our motto is, 'To Rebuild Bigger and Stronger Together.' Might not be bad a motto for the whole country."

Be it known that the UPC branch of Pentecostalism...
...believe that the ability to speak in tongues is a necessary indication of a valid religious conversion. They deny the legitimacy of the conversion of "born again" Christians from other denominations where tongues are rarely, if ever, spoken.

Been there, done that. Today's "speaking in tongues" phenomenon is a misstep from off the road of sanctification to spiritual maturity and true holiness.

It's the Person and Blood of Christ that counts Forever, not the manifestation in a misleading meaningless made-up mummery of mysterious murmuring by a mistaken mankind.

Regarding tongues, it would be better to study the centuries-old well-known and fixed basics of Biblical Hebrew and Greek languages, for I believe it is those which will be the common tongues of Heaven, expressing what other human Babel-founded tongues cannot fully communicate.

Hebrew, Aramaic, and Koine Greek are the tongues in which the Ever-Preserved Eternal Word is Written (Psalm 138, Matthew 4:4), and upon which a human's spirit feeds and flourishes:

לדוד אודך בכל־לבי נגד אלהים אזמרך׃
אשׁתחוה אל־היכל קדשׁך ואודה את־שׁמך על־חסדך ועל־אמתך כי־הגדלת על־כל־שׁמך אמרתך׃
ביום קראתי ותענני תרהבני בנפשׁי עז׃
יודוך יהוה כל־מלכי־ארץ כי שׁמעו אמרי־פיך׃
וישׁירו בדרכי יהוה כי גדול כבוד יהוה׃
כי־רם יהוה ושׁפל יראה וגבה ממרחק יידע׃
אם־אלך בקרב צרה תחיני על אף איבי תשׁלח ידך ותושׁיעני ימינך׃
יהוה יגמר בעדי יהוה חסדך לעולם מעשׂי ידיך אל־תרף׃

(Psalm 138 translated and interpreted as nearly as possible in the 17th century English tongue; bolding and superscript added for emphasis.)

I will praise thee with my whole heart: before the gods will I sing praise unto thee.
I will worship toward thy holy temple, and praise thy name for thy lovingkindness and for thy truth: for thou hast magnified thy word above all thy name.
In the day when I cried thou answeredst me, and strengthenedst me with strength in my soul.
All the kings of the earth shall praise thee, O LORD, when they hear the words of thy mouth.
Yea, they shall sing in the ways of the LORD: for great is the glory of the LORD.
Though the LORD be high, yet hath he respect unto the lowly: but the proud he knoweth afar off.
Though I walk in the midst of trouble, thou wilt revive me: thou shalt stretch forth thine hand against the wrath of mine enemies, and thy right hand shall save me.
The LORD will perfect^{make fully clear and complete} that which concerneth me: thy mercy, O LORD, endureth for ever: forsake not the works of thine own hands.

The God Jesus Christ exactly translating the Hebrew of Deuteronomy 8:3 into the precise Koine Greek of His century:

ο δε αποκριθεις ειπεν γεγραπται ουκ επ αρτω μονω ζησεται ανθρωπος αλλ επι παντι ρηματι εκπορευομενω δια στοματος θεου

(Matthew 4:4 translated from the Koine and interpreted as nearly as possible in the 17th century English tongue; bolding added for emphasis.)

But he answered and said, It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every ^spokenword that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.

Do you see what this says, Els? If a person is going to speak in an (unknown) tongue before the congregated believers, for the purpose of the targeted hearers let every (unknown) word that proceeds out of his mouth be done with (as Christ did for the Hebrew in translating it for the Gentile readers as He did for the hearing Satan), which is to translate and precisely interpret it into an understood language; or else let him be silent. Eh?

So, here is Paul's explicit command to the bickering Corinthians (and implicit to the "charismatic" Pentecostals of today), from 1 Cor. 14:27-28 in the KJV:

If any man speak in an unknown tongue, let it be by two, or at the most by three, and that by course; and let one interpret. But if there be no interpreter, let him keep silence in the church; and let him speak to himself, and to God.

And moreover, if such an utterance be the inspired Words of The God (and if it is not, it cannot be Spirit-given and should not be uttered), it must also be accurately translated and precisely interpreted either by the speaker himself or another human who comprehensively understands what is uttered (and never by a woman in the church context), or else let no one even pretend that by some kind of presumptuous fideism the utterance can be rendered on the fly by someone who has never before heard God Himself speak this way.

And remember, Paul was only speaking of the time frame between the birth of the church at Pentecost (33 AD) and the death of the last first-person apostolic witness of Jesus' spoken teachings and thus the legitimate last prophetic writings of the progressively specially revealed inspired inscripturated spoken words, who summarize That Which Is Finally And Fully Completed (Rev. 22:18-19; do notadd anything more). That time perspective would be limited to and inclusive of about 100 AD, as exactly prophesied by Paul in 1 Corinthians 13:9-10:

For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. But when that^{neuter gender, so cannot be a person} which is perfect^{fully and finally completed} is come, then that^{also neuter} which is in part shall be done away.

Some "Pentecostalists" yearningly wish to suppose that the "That Which Is Perfect" refers to the Second Coming of Jesus^{masculine gender} Christ; but it cannot, since the pronoun "that" is neuter, referring to a thing, not a person. The correct interpretation of this passage is that the "that" refers to, and only to, the appearance of--and final closure of any additions to--the completely and progressively inscripturated Written Words of God, the Bible contained in the Old and New Testaments.

Therefore, the false and misleading manifestation of "speaking in tongues" claimed for the entirely 20th Century unscriptural and phony "Azuza Street Revival" (click here) is not and cannot be a true Holy Spirit revival, which would focus on the Person and Work of Jesus Christ, not some physical sign of babbling trying to represent itself as an oral communication of the ideas originating in the mind of The Mighty All-Knowing God and delivered to the ears of humans.

No way, Jose.

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