James Attlee went to a black-led church in North London to investigate some seminal forms of worship.

"I believe sincerely that when you start to worship God and bring him praises that it goes up before Him as a memorial, and in return - the way I put it is, when you praise it's like condensation, it goes up and stays up there and forms a cloud and begins to build, build, build up and when the time comes it just breaks out and comes down with rain. It might come down with just a little rain but if you really praise, sometimes it comes down as a shower. That same blessing, that same thing you send up comes to be your blessing. You prepare yourself to give Him all the glory and the praise and in return He comes down. God loves praises. His presence is where He can find a people praising Him."

So you believe God actively enjoys our praises?

"Oh yes He does - the Bible says so."

And music has an important part to play in worshipping God?

"Music was first meant to glorify God, it was made for worship not for the world-hence we believe in using everything we can to worship God. Music stimulates and sets the pace for worship. We always have a choir ministering before the actual sermon, that's important to us, setting the atmosphere so that peoples' hearts will be more receptive to the word. As you know, reading from David, he began to play under the anointing and he began to mess up Saul on the inside. That's the power of music, it has a power, every music has a power, either for the good or for the bad. We believe music does that to God, it sets Him thinking, 'I've got to come in here because somebody's glorifying me.' There's a song that one of our pastors' daughters' wrote that 'angels are going to fold their wings of love and listen to the redeemed sing their song.' Let's face it, they don't know what it is like to be redeemed because they're angels. Someone else wrote a song that said 'God gave me a song that the angels can't sing, we've been washed in the blood of the crucified one, we've been redeemed'. Our song must be something great towards heaven because we've got salvation, we've been redeemed, we've been brought back by the blood of the Lamb." John Francis can't be said to speak for Black Pentecostalism - within that broad categorization lies an amazing variety of theological standpoints, as well as a large number of Britain's fastest growing churches. Nor is his greatest strength systematic theology. To be fair I don't think he was expecting, or was prepared for my line of questioning. Of necessity, when one is dealing with an actual experience of God, one's theology tends to be phenomenological, to use a cumbersome theological term...in other words, based on what is happening rather that what is written in books.

The whole of conservative evangelical culture revolts against this - the aim is to make everything, even the work of the Holy Spirit, fit within a neat theological paradigm. There are dangers within the extremes of both positions of course. One leads to a dry and cerebral religion devoid of any real encounter with God; the other to an experience-centred religion lacking in objective truth. Most Christians I know are struggling to find a balance between the two poles. Meanwhile the warmth, the spontaneity and the explosive creativity of churches like John's continue to make a unique contribution to the life of the church in Britain.

Holiness And Pop Music

Cultural insularity has long been a bugbear of Pentecostalism. And nowhere is that more evident that in attitudes towards music. There exists within all Pentecostal and Holiness groupings, which insist on a 'come out from among them and be ye holy' understanding of personal holiness, a huge tension. Actually living in the real world becomes all but impossible and can only be maintained at all, it would seem, by continual pulpit denouncements against earrings, cinema going, pubs, discos and a hundred and one other cultural minutiae perceived as the creeping 'worldliness' threatening the Church. Nowhere is the tension greater than in the area of music. Black Pentecostal churches abound in music, and such is the emphasis on nurturing and developing musical gifts that seemingly every black church is a potential training college for vocal excellence. But such is the holiness teaching in many black churches that any effort by talented vocalists within a congregation to sing songs other than worship material explicitly about God is viewed as a public admission of backsliding. Some American soul singers have been expelled from church membership the moment they first began to sing in nightclubs or record R&B. The tension in the whole black church/soul music cultural collision will be the subject of a future 'Cross Rhythms' article. For the moment let it suffice to say that until a less simplistic attitude towards art and the world is developed Pentecostalism will continue to view showbiz as, by nature, the Enemy's territory.

Products Of Culture

How much do our church traditions mould our attitudes? And are the differences between black and white churches really as great as they seem? We are all, to some extent products of our culture. This is no less true of the Christian that anyone else and many of our church practices and much of our theological overview stem from 'accidents' of our time and birth.

Be it as members of the Anglican communion, a Restoration house church or a Deep South Bible belt fundamentalist fellowship, some of what we do and believe has far less to do with revelation of God and objective truth gleaned from scripture than with cultural moves we embrace from whatever church background we come from. Similarly black churches clearly mould and shape believers into particular attitudes, beliefs and responses.
It's in a discussion like this that sociologists looking at black Pentecostalism like to bring in Africa and much inaccurate socio-speak is generated regarding a continuation of innate African tribalism. Such a simplistic view fails to grasp that in the early days of America's Pentecostalism and Holiness Sects black and white fellowships had a great deal of common ground in terms of church practice and music. A better, and more Christian understanding of Pentecostalism - both black and white - is to see it as a collective response sufficiently exuberant to reflect the joy found in an encounter with the living God, suitably scornful of the strait-jacket of empty religiosity and loosely organised enough to make room for laughter and tears, dancing and aisle-running, standing up and falling down, and a whole gamut of spiritually-derived gifts. The primary distinctive in black Pentecostalism is not Afro-American origins but the experience of baptism in the Holy Spirit within an established denominational framework.