Quote:
Originally Posted by CC1
I watched the commercial for "The Journey" and am not surprsed these guys are leaving the UPC. Nothing I saw in that video "looked" UPC and in the Mothership looks are a huge part.
It is interesting how hard it is for most traditional Oneness Pentecostals to even consider a different paradigm of church than church as something you dress up to the hilt for.
I had this discussion with a UPC relative a few months ago. She thinks it is terrible that a Preacher would preach without a suit and people would go to church dressed casually. She honestly sees it as disrespect to God. Believes the old mantra that you must dress up for church to "offer God your best",etc,etc.
I tried to explain to her that these people were not disrespecting God but looked at their relationship with him as more friend than someone you had to dress up for to impress.
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It always struck me as being something of a holdover from when we were "on the wrong side of the tracks." I heard a lot of sermons about how "Pentecost has arrived!" when I was young. We were "respectable people" now.
I also remember Denver Stanford preaching at GC once (early '80s?). He repeatedly emphasized a point about a conversation he had with someone "on the streets" of Boston. Some guy evidently had approached him while he was handing out tracts, read the word "Pentecostal" and commented on the fact that Bro. Stanford "didn't look like one of
those."
Bro. Stanford said in his sermon, "I had a shine on my shoes and a crease in trousers and he said, 'You don't look the part (Pentecost).'" This was in the era when a preacher who wanted to "really show what God could do" would leave the farm and move to the big city and win souls.
It was nice that these guys left the farm and all to win souls. It's just rather trite of the movement to get the "crease in my trousers" stuck in its craw.
*** AND - I don't mean to tie the good brother DS (named above) to any ornery opinions and the like. It's just his sermon at GC (along with the success he was blessed with at the time) seemed to somehow sum up a certain feeling that we all seemed to have at the time.
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