RELIGION / JOHN DART : Nazarenes Welcome Pentecostal

In a gesture that ignored its denomination’s deep-rooted opposition to Pentecostal practices--especially speaking in tongues--the Pasadena First Church of the Nazarene warmly welcomed Pentecostal pastor the Rev. Jack Hayford as guest preacher Wednesday night.

Before 1,600 worshipers, the Rev. Stephen Green, senior pastor, introduced Hayford, pastor of Church on the Way in Van Nuys, as a widely respected religious leader. “We love you very much,” Green said, hugging Hayford.

The invitation to preach to the second-largest Nazarene congregation in the nation was “unusual, and a bit daring,” said the Rev. Ponder Gilliland, retired president of Southern Nazarene University in Bethany, Okla.

E. R. Canfield of San Gabriel, who writes a gadfly-style newsletter for some 8,000 fellow Nazarenes, called it a historic turning point for the million-member denomination based in Kansas City, Mo.

Although both the Church of the Nazarene and the broader Pentecostal movement were born in Los Angeles around the turn of the century and share similar theological roots, the Nazarenes have staunchly opposed any incursion in their ranks of the distinctive Pentecostal and charismatic practice of speaking in tongues.

The New Testament describes speaking in tongues--making sounds whose meaning is unknown to the speaker--as one of the supernatural “gifts of the Holy Spirit.” Critics say it’s just a babbling imitation of a practice that was authentic only in biblical times.

Recently however, signs have surfaced that there is a Pentecostalist-style “underground” among the Nazarenes, despite the denomination’s opposition.

Last month, the pastor of the First Nazarene Church of Bozeman, Mont., submitted his resignation as a Nazarene clergyman after losing a battle to convince church authorities that the Bible and Protestant tradition do not prohibit speaking in tongues.

Last year, entire Nazarene congregations in Fairbanks, Alaska, and Lexington, Ky., were forced out of the denomination because their leaders refused to stop speaking in tongues, said the Rev. Al Woods, pastor of what was renamed the Door of Hope Church in Fairbanks.

Against that background, “It will be interesting to see whether a mega-church and its pastor will come under any rebuke,” Woods said in a telephone interview, referring to the 3,300-member Pasadena congregation’s hosting Hayford.

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In a 1976 statement still cited today, the Nazarene general superintendents strongly opposed tongues-speaking by Nazarenes and advised churches not “to schedule in our churches speakers or singers who are known to be active in the so-called charismatic movement.”

However, the Rev. Jack Stone, general secretary of the denomination, said Friday that the statement “does not preclude having an occasional (Pentecostal) guest speaker as long as he doesn’t inveigh against our doctrine.”

Pentecostalists call speaking in tongues “prayer language.”

It comes from the biblical Book of Acts, which says that on the Day of Pentecost after Christ’s death, the Holy Spirit descended upon the apostles, causing them to speak in strange tongues as they were launched on the work of founding Christianity.

All of Christianity commemorates Pentecost as the birth of the early church, but Pentecostalists also recall it as scriptural evidence for the legitimacy of the modern-day revival of tongues-speaking.

The Catholic Church and most mainline Protestant church bodies today have accepted the presence of Pentecostal believers, usually called charismatics, in their ranks--although only after a period of controversy surrounding their emergence during the 1960s and early 1970s.

“There is also an underground movement of Nazarene pastors who believe in the gift of tongues, but they keep quiet about it,” claimed Canfield, who attends the Pasadena church.

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Although Green and scattered other worshipers at the service Wednesday raised their arms in prayer while singing, that once-telltale sign of a Pentecostal believer has spread to many other Christians.

“I am not a Pentecostal, but I’m not anti-Pentecostal either,” Green said in an interview.

“I think maybe the day of grumbling and nit-picking is a thing of the past,” said Green. “We want to be Nazarene, but we see ourselves as part of the larger whole.”

Green said that Hayford, a pastor in the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel founded in 1927 by Los Angeles evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, “speaks beyond Pentecostalism; he witnesses to the kingdom of God.”

Indeed, Hayford co-sponsored a series of interdenominational prayer gatherings of Los Angeles area pastors and was the architect of the Luis Palau San Fernando Valley Crusade last year.

With a diplomatic, conversational style of preaching, Hayford is a frequent speaker at national evangelical gatherings involving both Pentecostal and non-Pentecostal Christians. He said he had spoken once before to a Nazarene group, but that it was an underground charismatic congregation.

Indicating that he was mindful of the tact needed in his Pasadena appearance, Hayford quipped Wednesday that “a whole bunch of people are praying and fasting at Church on the Way for their pastor, saying, ‘Lord, help him be good.’ ”

Hayford’s congregation need not have worried.

He referred twice during his hourlong talk to the New Testament description of the apostles’ Pentecost experience, but made no mention of speaking in tongues.

Hayford said that in his church and the Nazarene congregation he sees “a passion to be filled with the Spirit (which is) called baptism of the Spirit in our terms and sanctification in your terms.”

The concept of sanctification, though variously defined, implies that when believers are filled with the Holy Spirit, they will find sin less alluring and lead sanctified lives, many of them forgoing movies and other activities deemed morally questionable.

“Whatever you have been taught, as I have been, about the difference in our traditions,” Hayford said, “the more I look at people. . . . the more I see they’re all just the same--a passion for holiness before the Lord.”