Pioneers, Not Prairie Romances

It’s one thing to ridicule prairie romances and the people who read them. It’s quite another to offer a viable alternative for people who hunger to read something more ambitious.

Last week, several readers speculated that Pentecost suffered from a lack of important writings due to a non-existent academic culture, insecurity, and a tendency to romanticize the past. I would also add the lack of a paying infrastructure for writers, a church-specific culture that encourages (often healthily) high involvement, and the lack of Apostolic examples to emulate.

All of these factors distract from the solitary task of writing serious works of high ambition. Most of these factors distract from the solitary task of writing simple-minded romances, 365 day devotionals, and religious self-help books. Except, the later are appearing by the dozens.

See, I hate writing this, but at the end of the day, they’re all excuses. Ultimately, we’re either going to pursue the calling God placed in our hearts, or we’re not. We’re either going to sacrifice our lesser interests for a significant dream or we’re going to keep filling our schedules with more unmemorable events. We’re either going to face the fear straight-up or allow self-justification to confound our heart. As Jedi Master Yoda said, “Do or not do. There is no try.”

O Pioneers!
One reason I started ninetyandnine.com (with a like-minded bunch of hearty adventurers) was my utter frustration with the quality of articles in our official publications. By quality, I’m not just dismissing the writing, but the article topics—so very few seemed to be engaging the world around them. The only way I could change that was to co-create a different type of Apostolic magazine. It’s pretty well consumed my life for seven years now, but we all have something to show for it. God blessed our dive off the cliff.

Writing something important will take a similar fearlessness. Right now, in our little sub-culture of Christianity, it calls for pioneers, the determined loners who are willing to grind out the trails for others, the bull-headed who are willing to make mistakes (sometimes in public), lose days (weeks?) of their lives exploring dead-end ravines, and face unforeseen difficulties just to reach their destination (which may not be all it’s promised to be).

It takes a different mindset.

Interestingly, it’s the mindset of an apostle that’s needed. Interestingly, one definition of “apostle” is “pioneer.” Think about it—we call the Apostle Paul the greatest missionary ever because of all the churches he pioneered.

The mission of an apostle is “to proclaim God's revelation, to teach the new truth the church would need to grow and thrive.” That’s the mission of pioneer Apostolic literary authors. After all, our most ambitious writings must proclaim God’s revelation through characterization, metaphor, and exposition.

That the apostle's calling is the most peculiar of the five-fold ministries isn’t the issue. It’s the most necessary for the growth (in every sense) of the Church. It’s when the apostles are unleashed that the transformations occur. It's in the unexplored lands that God rewrites man's rules with revival. It's what pioneers crave.

We don’t need more Apostolic writers. We need more writing apostles.

Ready to dive off the cliff with me?

What is Pentecostal Writing?

As 90&9.com’s executive editor for content, I read endless articles from an Apostolic perspective. I also write more than my fair share. It was at the completion of a recent cover that I thought, “This is an important article.” That’s an intoxicating thought. It empties your head and lightens your heart and fills both with peculiar dreams of immortality and respect.

It didn’t take me long for me to realize it was the topic, not the essay, that was important. I had served only as the messenger. Oh well, it was an intoxicating thought.

It did make me wonder if there were any important Apostolic writings.

For a piece of writing to be “Important” it’s not enough to be powerful and true. It must also be ground-breaking and insightful and forward-looking and forceful enough to make readers rethink themselves; often it reframes an argument for a generation, providing the template for future interpretation.

I had a knowledgeable Pentecostal argue to me that there were no important Apostolic writings to date. He felt our oral tradition interfered with this process, but added that even our valuable doctrinal writings are defensive in nature, so couldn’t be considered Important. I found that fascinating.

Cases in Point

Three non-Apostolic examples of Important:

* T.S. Eliot recast poetry with The Wasteland.

* George Keenan’s writings provided the intellectual framework for the United States’ policy of containment towards the U.S.S.R. during the Cold War.

* In 1993, Samuel P. Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations posited that the world’s upcoming, post-Soviet conflicts would be over religious and cultural identities, not politics. It wasn’t an outright prediction of 9/11, but…

Speaking in New Tongues

Maybe it is finding someone brave enough to recreate the language to accommodate our experience.

The father of modern African literature, Chinua Achebe, crafted a new language for his seminal Things Fall Apart: “The story is so different from what I had read as a child; I knew I couldn’t write like Dickens or Conrad. My story would not accept that. So you had to make an English that was new. Whether it was going to work or not, I couldn't tell.”

Maybe we're at a similar starting point, awaiting direction.

What is Pentecostal Identity?

Maybe there’s no Important Apostolic writing because we don’t have a well-defined identity.

Many writing subcultures present distinct commonalities; for instance, Southern writing often features quirky characters, homespun sayings, racial tensions, and sweltering settings.

Maybe our subculture isn’t potent enough to lend itself to a particular style of writing because we are chiefly Americans (largely indistinguishable from mass culture) with potent doctrinal truths. Is doctrine, its resulting standards, and large social events all that makes us “us”? (Am I overlooking some important distinctives?)

Many would see these three distinctives as an overabundance of fodder for some smart fiction (Jane Austen anyone?) or strong cultural analysis. Somehow the Catholics have spawned superior authors (Flannery O’Conner, Graham Greene, Walker Percy) and cultural analysts (starting with their two most recent popes), so it’s not like an Apostolic outlook is a preposterous proposition.

Maybe we are believers built around doctrinal ideas, with room for numerous amorphous characteristics, but few clear definitives. If true, that’s okay. The United States is built around a set of ideas with few clear definitives and it’s doing just fine.

Still, we’ve been at this for over a century—shouldn’t we have something to show for it?