What is a Semicostal?

When people cold call the church office, they have several standard questions they ask:

Where are you located?

When are your services?

What kind of church is this?

The first two are pretty easy to answer. The third is more complex.

They are hoping for a simple descriptive term by which they can make some assumptions, and I am hesitant to give them that label. Once we attach a descriptive label to anything, we preclude exceptions and deviations from the stereotype. If someone is trying to determine where you stand politically, they are hoping you will say liberal, conservative, libertarian, Democrat or Republican. Even though your own voting practices and beliefs on individual issues might defy stereotype, once you give them a label, an entire set of assumptions are made. "Oh, you are a Democrat?" (Assumption: anti-Christian, pro-abortion, anti-military, pro-same-sex-marriage...)  It works the same with religious labels.

Are you Calvinist or Arminian?Evangelical? Fundamentalist? Reformed? Charismatic? Cessationist? Pentecostal?

As soon as you identify with any of those terms you accept the baggage that is attached. What about those of us who are not precisely Arminian, but are also not Calvinists? Can one be a 2-point Calvinist? That's my problem with telling a caller that the church is Pentecostal.

I have absolutely no reservations about identifying with the presence and power of the Holy Spirit as manifested on the Day of Pentecost. I have great reservations about identifying with much of the excess, heresy and just extra-Biblical nonsense that has come to typify much of the modern Pentecostal Movement. A lot of good has come from Christian TV, but a lot of garbage has spewed forth also, and it has colored the perception of Pentecostalism in the public mind.

It started out almost as a joke, calling our church semicostal as a reaction to pentecostal excess. The label seems to have stuck. Now I get lots of questions about the precise meaning of that label. The time has come to begin to craft a definition.

I am working on it.