I'm Still A.G.

I grew up in a mixed home. Dad was a Methodist, far away from God and home, and Mom was  Panamanian born and was raised Catholic. My dad moved us into a house close to his mother before he left for his Air Force tour of duty. My mom knew very little English, and neither she nor my grandmother were able to drive.  Therefore, we walked to the nearest church which was an Assembly of God church in my small S.C. town. Mom didn’t attend very often, opting to pray at home. One time when she did attend, the Pastor saw her praying to a picture of Jesus in the little hallway. The next day, he took it down so she would not commit idolatry!

 I remain AG for many reasons, and not one of them is because we are “the church”, that we are the only one doctrinally correct, or that we have the greatest governance. We have much to improve upon. My reasons have mostly been people…like a white-haired Louise Coleman who taught me in Sunday School and a humble servant named Melvin Gaulden who picked me and my brothers up in a VW micro bus so that we could attend services. I‘m still here because of Southeastern professors like William Gibson, who taught me Greek and how to stink at soccer, Henry Evans, who killed me in Ethics, and Bob Elliot, who showed me how a man cries and then made me cry!

 I am still in the Fellowship because of Dr. Homer who told us about a terrible time on a Southern Pacific island during WWII. As a chaplain, he had expended all of his energies caring for the boys who faced death and dying at every turn. Under the stress he broke emotionally and found his healing while lying in a cold rain. His release came as he lifted hands in the air in an offering of praise that washed away a type of weariness that befalls only the bravest. There the Holy Spirit once again filled him, and people across the nation and around the world have been recipients of the grace of God that attended that life thereafter.

All of the aforementioned were AG as was my friend Donnie Rogers. After we had graduated from Southeastern, he told me that he thought I would never be an AG minister as he thought I fit the Presbyterian mold much better. I loved him. He was free in the Spirit, and I was much more subdued. But Donnie, just like Bill Gibson, Henry Evans, Robert Elliot, and Dr. Homer, was real. None of these men were perfect.

I have remained a part of the AG because of guys like a young AG pastor I sat with yesterday. Serving his country overseas, he came home to a wife who was wayward and who didn’t want to be married. Broken by divorce, living in despair, and ready to take his own life, he was awakened by the prevenient grace of God and he turned to Him.  He served in an AG church under an older pastor who loved him and showed him the life of grace. Now he pastors a very small church in a southern Georgia farming community. His passions are serving and meeting the spiritual and physical needs of the poor and needy. He makes $150 a week, when the church is able to pay him, which he uses to buy toilet paper, paper towels, and other supplies for the church as well as meet his own needs.

 My AG experience has allowed me to be part of a community of grace where one does not have to check his brain at the door nor calm the exhilaration of heart stirred by the nearness of the I AM. I have thought about leaving because I also have been wounded. But then, nearly everyone I love has hurt me; to be sure, I have hurt them too. I remain, and I have no stones to throw at those who leave!