PENTECOST IN THE CHURCH

By: A. M. Allchin

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

FAIRACRES PUBLICATIONS 029

In an address given to the Charismatic Conference at the Digby Stuart College, Roehampton in July 1972, A. M. Allchin examines the progress through history and the historical growth of the Church from the first Pentecost. This discussion seeks a marriage between theology and personal experience; a theology of the work of the Spirit both in the life of each person and in the life of the Church as a whole. The author suggests hints towards this in the Church’s history and in the texts used in worship which, after the Bible, should be the prime source for Christian theology. He draws on Grundtvig and Wesley, two of the greatest liturgical Protestant hymn-writers who have created something richer and fuller than the simply personal, immediate overflowing of praise which one finds, for instance, in a gospel song. He seeks a wholeness of experience centred in Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism, but which does not exclude the further Eastern Churches, nor the great families of the Reformation with all their many ramifications. Despite all the divisions there is still a unity of life and experience within the one family of those who by faith and baptism have entered into Christ.