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Submitted the following to The Chicago Defender newspaper. I have no
idea if they will publish an edited version, as is, or not at all.
Welcome your reactions.
Regards,
Marlon Millner
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Open Letter to Bishop Arthur Brazier
Oct. 18, 2007
To Bishop Arthur Brazier,
I was deeply saddened to read in a Chicago Defender article on Oct. 11,
"Bishop Brazier Leaves PAW," that you intend to end your more than 50
years of fellowship with the Pentecostal Assemblies of the World.
To the average reader of The Defender, the internal theological
squabbles of any religious group remain marginal to why people seek
faith in the first place or Christian faith in particular and
Pentecostal faith specifically. It is because we live in what many
scholars rightly call a post-denominational age that I write you openly,
and hope to share with readers the broader loss to Pentecostal
organizations like PAW, when churches like Apostolic Church of God pull
out.
As a third-generation Apostolic Pentecostal, who has served and worked
in many Christian faith communities (Baptist, Church of God in Christ
and Anglican), I felt a calling in my freshman year at Morehouse College
in Atlanta to not only experience Pentecostalism, but to study it as
well. And PAW was central to both of those pursuits.
During my freshman year, though I had been raised the son and grandson
of Apostolic Pentecostal preachers, it was only after attending the PAW
Mid-Winter convention in Atlanta that I experienced the hallmark of
Pentecostalism -- the baptism in the Holy Spirit. But another unusual
event occurred that year.
During my time in the college library, I started to search for every
book in the library that had something to do with Pentecostalism. It was
then I learned of William Joseph Seymour -- the pioneer and African
American leader of the Azusa Street Revival, from which Pentecostalism
became popular. I learned about Garfield T. Haywood, the first African
American leader of PAW, which from its beginnings was interracial.
I also discovered an obscure book, published in 1969 by William Eerdmans
Press called Black Self Determination. That book in the library was by
you. I was taken aback that a Pentecostal preacher and an Apostolic
Pentecostal preacher in particular had so powerfully addressed the
social condition of African Americans during the height of the modern
Civil Rights Movement. My interest only deepened when -- though from
North Carolina -- I got a summer job after my freshman year at The
Chicago Tribune -- working in the editorial library. I began to pour
over old newspaper article clip files on you. Your work with Martin
Luther King, Jr. Your outspoken and controversial outreach to and work
with gangs in Chicago, such as the Black Stone Rangers. Your
collaboration with the Industrial Areas Foundation to create what is now
known as The Woodlawn Organization.
You were no typical or ordinary black preacher or Apostolic Pentecostal.
However, you were in a sphere of several prominent black Apostolic
Pentecostals -- like Robert McMurray in Los Angeles, Robert Lawson in
New York and Smallwood Williams in Washington, DC, who pastored large
Apostolic Pentecostal churches, and engaged across Christian and other
social lines to work for positive change, peace and justice in
communities of color, and around the world.
However, like them, your political and social work often outstripped
your theological reflection. Your discovery of certain ideas from the
Protestant Reformation about the salvation status of a believer were new
for many in Apostolic Pentecostal circles, but not nearly as progressive
and forward-thinking as your work for community transformation.
You would not remember this, but I recall with disappointment, when I
reached out to you by letter, as an eager Apostolic Pentecostal trying
to blend the spiritual and critical in college and you referred me to
materials from Moody Bible Institute. That was a far cry from the
McCormick Theological Seminary, or the University of Chicago Divinity
School -- places I would visit a few years later. And it certainly could
not be further from The Divinity School at Harvard University, where I
would earn a master of divinity years later.
Many were shocked to learn that I as an Apostolic Pentecostal would
attend Harvard for theological studies. Aren't they liberal? They don't
even believe in Jesus or Christianity there, right? Harvard certainly is
religiously liberal and plural. However, Harvard Divinity School was the
same place that in 1984 held the only scholarly conference on Apostolic
Pentecostalism ever held at a major university in North America. I have
the papers from that conference.
My experiences in following your ministry and the others I have listed
here led me to believe that being progressive is far more than
interacting with non-Apostolic Pentecostal Christians, or inviting them
to preach in a denomination's annual meeting.
Bishop Brazier, the Church of God in Christ invited Robert Lawson to
address its annual meeting in 1945, because Lawson and Charles Mason
were personal friends. But they clearly did not agree on issues of
doctrine. And who can say the last time an Apostolic Pentecostal --
since then, has ever preached in Memphis, the headquarters city of
COGIC?
Consider your colleague in Chicago, Rev. Dr. Stephen Thurston. He may
have all types of preachers come to New Covenant Missionary Baptist
Church and preach, but when the annual session of the National Baptist
Convention of America takes place, the preachers reflect the
denomination and rightly so.

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