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CHAPTER 6:

PENTECOSTAL PHASE TRANSITIONS

By their late teens, my two offspring, sons of an Alcohol Anonymous, born again, originally Christian Science mother and a spiritually struggling and mostly secular Jewish psychiatrist father, had been unfulfilled in their hungry search for the experience of a personally meaningful God. After years of perhaps too academic conversations with their parents, visits to a variety of houses of worship, talks with University of California religion professors and evenings with a Ph.D. psychologist-rabbi and friends at the neighborhood synagogue, they turned somewhere else. Some of their high school friends who were Evangelical Christians took them to their Assembly of God, Pentecostal and other Christian, direct experience of God, churches. They came to love what they sometimes called their Wednesday night and Sunday morning “rock and roll,” services.

Struggling with the post-Vietnam cynical mistrust of authority and the marijuana apathetic nihilism of the 60’s and 70’s, and clearly not enticed by what they regarded as their father’s vacuous mélange of New Age Eastern Religions and secular brain science, they spoke about their sudden and life-changing experiences. They studied, memorized and quoted the Scriptures as part of their commitment to their word churches. As erstwhile cynical teenagers, now positive and brimming with faith, I secretly called it denial, they described what was happening to them as New

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