Black vs. White

Yes, that is so weird the way they are trying to pretend that all white Pentecostals are from Kansas and all black Pentecostals are from Southern California, as if there were not any white people present at Azusa Street and as if only the black part of it matters. Sure, the Pentecostal movement was very integrated at its starting point, shockingly so for Jim Crow days, but anyway it was mostly the white Pentecostals who went out as missionaries and rarely the black Pentecostals for various reasons, not that it matters now or not that we can rewrite history now in this regard. We can only look forward to what is to come, for example, the Second Coming of Christ. Back in the old days, those were different times. There might not have been an Azusa Street if there had not been a Kansas, and yet Charles of Kansas was not able to continue running the show later in Southern California because no single person or state can run the show, not even Missouri. If Kansas' Charles, a white supremacist of the extreme variety, had been in charge he would have dampened the Spirit even sooner, because Kansas obviously was not responsible for the increase. Anyway, the Kingdom of God is not a matter of geographical boundaries. We have no need of whiny Kansas prairie dogs to tell us where to go. The joke about Springfield being the Emerald City does not work, not only because actually Seattle is informally dubbed the Emerald City, and not Springfield, a city not located in Kansas, but also because Seattle was not really the crossroads of anything much in terms of Pentecostal missionary history, mostly just another city for people to pass through after unloading from their ships docking at the port in Victoria, Vancouver, Canada. Sarah Kugler, for example, the famous single-woman missionary who later married Daniel Sheets, not to be confused with my second or third cousin, and whose photograph appears in the family collection as an acquaintance of the great-grandparents, often docked in Canada upon arrival from the Orient but apparently spent very little time in that country, soon beating a direct path to the United States, which is home for a lot of American missionaries who obviously are U.S. citizens and not Canadians. In the age before airplanes, Sarah would have traveled by car, bus, or train to her home state of Kansas, a square block on the U.S. map through which I have driven only once, although she also apparently also lived some time in Arizona, another block on the U.S. map in which I have spent very little time only passing through. It is probably safe to say that Seattle was not an Emerald City for Kugler as it also is not the Emerald City for the vast majority of Pentecostal Christians who have never been there and don't know anything about it. Nevertheless, just because Kugler was a Kansas Pentecostal and acquainted with lots of other Pentecostal missionaries and mentioned in many books, that does not mean that she was later a minister with the Assemblies of God due to doctrinal confusions. Neither does this mean that Pentecostals have any use or need for an Emerald City of the Frank Baum variety. We all know that Frank was a Kansas atheist or agnostic or something like that and that his whimsical novel cannot be regarded as a textbook in the theological sense, just a sort of humorous and entertaining parody of Depression era migrations from small farm towns of Americana to big industrial cities. It doesn't have very much to say about Pentecostalism, at least not seriously speaking. This explains why these nasty Kansas prairie dogs Sharon and Sharon and Jan have nothing intelligent to say to us in any serious sense. Just as in days of old, we see that Kansas folks think they know everything but really don't have a clue about who I am and cannot be taken seriously without serious risk to the life of the Spirit which is the heart of the matter. Without the Holy Spirit at the heart of the matter, everything is just vanity of vanities, obviously, and there just isn't any reason for being. So obviously we have no need of this Bob to explain to us this glaringly obvious, basic point because everybody already knows this anyway. Shutting down the life to explain this point is sort of like throwing out the baby with the bath water. A dead life is just not worth living.