A Church’s Challenge: Holding On to Its Young (Third of 3 about Pentecostals in NYC)

If music is the motor that drives Pentecostal worship, the band and choir at Ark of Salvation for the New Millennium, a little storefront church in west Harlem, could use a tuneup. Ragged and off-key at times, they are easily outclassed when they sit in with the seasoned musicians at other churches.

Yet they grab attention for one simple reason: They are often the only teenagers in the room.

As Pentecostalism advances across the world, winning converts faster than any other Christian denomination and siphoning believers from more established faiths, it is also suffering its own slow leak: young people who are falling away from the faith.

Mainline Christian churches have grappled with the problem for years. And recently, evangelical leaders in the United States sounded an alarm over “an epidemic of young people leaving.”

But the loss is doubly distressing for Pentecostals, evangelical Christians who can be especially zealous in seeking new members and rejecting the secular culture they feel is luring adolescents away from religion.

Against that backdrop, Ark of Salvation is an unusual success. Unlike most of the other Pentecostal churches they visit, this 60-member congregation has attracted a devoted core of teenagers — more than a dozen — who sing and pray at every service. This is no accident.

When the first of them showed up two years ago at the austere storefront on Amsterdam Avenue, dragged along by friends or family, they had little inclination toward religion or music. But Pastor Danilo Florian saw in them the seeds of his church band. More important, he saw in this motley bunch of knockabout youngsters the future of his fledgling church.

It's really the Pentecostals who are saving China.

I think that the Church (the Catholic Church) needs to reach out to these converts and provide them the "High Church" support network and sacraments.

There's nothing like the direct contact with the otherworldly to inspire and inflame faith, but that faith then needs to be tended and nurtured, and lifetime tending and nuturing requires dull grey things like administration and office space and the more mundane business of dispensing charity and education.

Pentecostals leaking back into the world after encountering God is a bad thing. Pentecostals "leaking" into the Catholic Church to round out and anchor their experiences is a good thing.

Of course, the Catholic Church needs to be welcome, and dares not to contradict the act of the Holy Spirit that brought these people to Christ in the first place. After all, it is the Pentecostals, more than anyone else, who are braving the terrors of China and Arabia. They are winning the converts to God in those places, and earning the crown of martydom. God is really moving through them, because the more organized religions are more timid. And so Catholicism must embrace these converts to Christ through Pentecostalism, because the Pentecostals are braving the lions more than the other Churches.

Oddly, I agree with both of you, but only because different churches often have different styles, depending (mostly?) on the personality and leading of the pastor.

The Church of God in Christ people I knew in my "wayward youth" had started a school for run-aways and throw-aways, probably violating 100 state licensing requirements. The local Catholics were very helpful to them, helping them run through the regulatory maze and get themselves some funding. So because they were collaborators in a good work, the COGICS and Catholics got along swimmingly, even praying together (not officially or as a group, but just individuals attending each other's celebrations.)

The school actually invited me to speak to their student body in the 1980's about prolife. That also was a good area for getting to know and trust and like each other.

OTOH, some of the Pentecostals think Catholics are gross idolators, and some C's think P's are just overheated nutz. I've seen that too. Just depends on the circumstances and the personalities.

Indeed.

The most important thing in the world today is the conversion of China. China is going to be the world hegemon within a century. They have more people and harder working people than America, and the Americans cannot close that gap. So, China will lead, and we will be relative to China what France is relative to America. A smallish country with different values and views, with a glorious past but a subordinated present.

Our grandchildren will work for the Chinese, just as the Europeans today largely work for Americans.

Given that future,and given that the economic advantages of China will be invincible (because based on population - the same reason that European countries stack up, relative to one another, based on population) in the secular realm. And, if China were to remain as utterly secular and cynical as it is, that would be a very uncomfortable place to be.

But Christianity is exploding in China. Tens of millions of converts every year. The idea, the ideals and the hopefulness all appeal to the Chinese. The Falun Gong took off because it offered the Chinese something - spiritual freedom - but it's a new, small movement, easuily crushed.

Christian evaneglization is illegal in China, and ruthlessly punished. Christians are routinely tortured and killed. But Christianity is blossoming there anyway, and it's NOT Orthodoxy, or the Baptists or Lutherans or Methodists, or the Catholics. It is Pentecostalism. THEY are taking the cross across China. And THEY are winning the crown of martyrdom.

And in the face of that, what can the other Churches do?
Attack the work of the Holy Spirit in converting the Chinese?
Remember that the Bible warns that this is the ONE UNPARDONABLE SIN.
Better not do it.
It is not Catholic mmissionaries who are screaming out the last hours of their lives in Chinese dungeons and then departing for heaven. It is Pentecostals. God has chosen the Pentecostals to do this.
Why?
Obviously because China is so organized and so powerful that NOTHING truly organized can exist there in defiance of the government. China SUCCESSFULLY monitors the Internet. Organizations are destroyed. Is there such a thing as independent Catholicism, Catholicism without leadership, lay Catholic missionary work which is salvific WITHOUT the benefit of organized worship? Early Christians in the Roman persecution thought so, but today? Well, that would mean Catholics out of sacramental oversight and out of control. The Church doesn't "do" freelance.

But there are 1.2 billion Chinese needing salvation.
So, what has God done? He has made Christian prophets, effectively. He simply reaches down and inspires individuals, rather randomly, and therby short-circuits every effort to control evangelism by controlling the MEANS OF COMMUNICATION and breaking up organizations. China can do both of those things, but it can't stop God from touching people directly. So he does. And China is going Christian in a big way.

Catholicism must adapt its theology and concepts to embrace this work of the Holy Spirit.

I know about it. They contacted me when I told a priest about my visions and encounters with spirits, etc.

But the Catholic Charismatic movement isn't what's converting China. It's the Pentecostals and the Holy Spirit. The Catholic Church needs to find the way to provide those converts the mundane religious "administrative support" that is really necessary to anchor faith once it's been acquired by inspiration.

And just providing that support is itself very dangerous.

My whole real point is that Catholicism needs to recognize that the conversion of China is authentic Christianity, and the most important movement in the world today, and that the HRCC is mostly standing outside of it. Eventually, Catholicism will come in the door there in bigger force, and what must be avoided is the tired old "Catholic v. Protestant" debates o Europe. What is happening in China is a different thing. The Holy Spirit is moving people to Christ in a world where there is no organized Christianity able to help them,. When the Church is able to come in, it must EMBRACE these Pentecostals and support them, and not demand too much of them by way of genuflection to a European creed. The Church didn't bring Christianity to them, God did, working through the Pentecostsals. So the standard "Protestant, not good" approach has to go. Chinese Pentecostal: very good. God's work. Now let us help anchor it.

I know very little about the relations between the Catholic Church and China. Papal diplomacy has been anything-but-infallible (ask the ghost of Emperor Kangxi!) and even establishing practical cooperation between the canonical Church and the Patriotic Association seems to be stalled.

In a related issue, when +Samuel Ruiz down in Chiapas proposed ordaining many hundreds of married deacons to undertake preaching and teaching (something which I think should be done not only in Chiapas but in Bronx and Beijing and everywhere), as I remember it was shot down by the red hats in Rome.

As I say, I know little; but the little I know is not encouraging.

If the Pentecostals are doing the preaching and the dying to bring people to Christ, then praise God. I think some sort of fraternal cooperation would be exceedingly God-pleasing here, but sadly, I don't see it happening anytime soon on the scale you're talking about.

But you know more than I do. Why don't you post some links?

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