Monday, November 11, 2013

Books

It may seem strange that I have found the books of Jacob Chamberlain interesting as he was actually a missionary for the Dutch Reformed Church, to which we have no direct connection and in which we have no personal interest. Chamberlain was a missionary of the 1800s while our church, the Pentecostal denomination of AG, did not even exist until about 1916. The Dutch Reformed Church brings to mind visions of the Crystal Cathedral which was recently sold out to Catholics so there is nothing there to draw our interest in any way, not that there ever was. The Crystal Cathedral was a repository of old-fashioned stuffed churchiness veering, as on a pendulum, toward high church extremes. Pentecostals, on the other hand, are somewhere on the low church end of the pendulum which suits us just fine. In our churches we have no use for organs that look like rocket launchers, what with all the electric guitars and keyboards in current use. Nobody really cares about organs in our churches when a good piano is available. I never took organ lessons from Mark Thallander because I really never cared for the sound of organ music and there was no reason to explain that I just don't care about organs. So?