ACTION STARTS WITH PRAISE

One of the gifts of Pentecostal piety is the immediacy of our embodied response in worship. Before we are sent out into the world “to love and serve” empowered to do the “work we’ve been given to do,” our souls, our feet, our bodies (to whatever ever degree we are able) are already moving, animated by a faith that would be dead without it. Faith without movement, faith without action, faith without loving, life-giving, liberating activity is void of anything real. It is an abstraction. Pentecostals do not wait to embody their ideas of God and God’s Kingdom. They immediately raise their hands, stomp their feet, run, and even dance (the most liberated movement). An action of response to the proclaimed Word, to a quickening of gratefulness, like fire shot up in their bones, their entire being becomes animated toward the ends of a Kingdom coming. When they are sent out into the world, it is a continuum of a sanctified work begun in the sanctuary at the altar. Action starts with praise. The same is true of Sacramental Christians, so that when you merge the two (Pentecostal, Sacramental) you find a potent openness to the Spirit’s empowerment for the life of the world.