Interview with Pastor Jimi, Solomon's Porch Four Square Church

 

Interview with Pastor Jimi

Solomon’s Porch Four Square Church

St. George, Utah

 

Interview takes place in Solomon’s Porch Sanctuary

February 18, 2016

 

Matt:       I’m here with Reverend Jimi Kestin of the Solomon’s Porch Four Square Church in St. George, Utah.  Hello, Jimi.

Pastor Jimi:  How are you?

M:    I’m fine, thank you.  Let’s start with your biography.  How did you get from being born to being a Reverend at the Four Square Church in St. George, and along the way tell me about the Four Square Church.

PJ:   I was born in 1957 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.  I was born Jewish; Russian Jews from both sides of the family who escaped the communist revolution and the czar. .

M:    Were your parents immigrants?

PJ:   Both my parents were born here.  All four grandparents, I believe, were born in Russia near the Polish border.  I’m second generation American.  I was raised in a not real strict Jewish home, but a Jewish home.  One of those families that rarely made it to service except for the big holidays.  At 13, after my bar mitzvah, which is the Jewish form of confirmation in to adulthood, I walked away from faith.  There was something missing from that faith walk.  I preceded to be, like many children of the 70s, far more focused on a secular, party lifestyle.

M:    Is there a strong Jewish community in Milwaukee?

PJ:   There is a solid Jewish community.  There has been for years.  It’s an interesting dynamic.  I don’t know what it is like now, I haven’t been back in 40 years.  It was a somewhat segregated community.  Each ethnic group had its own enclave.  There was the old Jewish neighborhood and then the newish Jewish neighborhood.  There were the German neighborhoods, the Polish neighborhood.  There was the Serbian neighborhoods.  The Catholics didn’t live in the same neighborhoods as the Lutherans who didn’t live in the same neighborhoods as the Jews.  That’s the way that place was in the 60s and 70s growing up.  I walked away from faith. . .

M:    Was this a conscious decision?

PJ:   My parents didn’t force the issue.  I would occasionally show up with them for holidays, but once I was old enough to make my own decisions, like I say, there was something missing from that faith attachment.  Today I know what it is that’s missing.  To me, it was dry.  There were things that didn’t make sense about what was being taught.  Today I understand, for me, why that is.  The short version is, from 13 to 30 I lead a very secular party lifestyle.

M:    In Milwaukee?

PJ:   No.  I left Milwaukee at 18 and moved to the hottest climate I could find a job in, Phoenix, where I spend a few years, and then to Las Vegas, where I spend most of my adult life.  At 30 I walked away from alcohol, drugs, the party lifestyle, and began an 8 years journey towards finding a faith that worked for me.

M:    Were you having a career in these years?

PJ:   I had a very successful career.  I worked in the automobile industry.  I managed car dealerships for a living, in Phoenix and Vegas and Wisconsin.  I’ve been in management since my early-20s, late-teens.  I moved up into management quickly in that industry.  I managed car dealerships and staffs and departments throughout my adult career.  That journey also involved meeting my wife.  Pastor Rickine, who was a Christian.  When we met Rickine was a Christian, I was not.  We met in Las Vegas.  Over the course of the first 8 years of our relationship, after we married, I was on a journey seeking to find a faith that worked for me.  I was obstinately against the idea of it being Christianity.  There was a period there where I really believed that we could define our own god and then worship in a way that we think that ought to be.  I went about, if I was going to define God what would it be and I came up with these attributes and I functioned in that until I came to the realization that if you can define your own god you are still it.

M:    You are your own god.

PJ:   Exactly.  Because, by definition, God is bigger than us.  There are certain basic definitions that I understand about God.  If there is a God, He is timeless, He’s eternal, which means he exists outside of time, He has not beginning and He has no end.  He spoke time and everything into existence.  For God to be God there are certain attributes He must have.  Therefore, because He’s timeless, eternal, all-powerful, all-knowing, exists outside of time, knows the past, the present, and the future, because He can see the whole thing from outside of time, He created time along with everything else, He would have all knowledge, he would know everything, he would be all-powerful.  All meaning all.  Those attributes would also make him completely unchanging.  Because if you knew everything there would never be a need to change because you already know the past, present, future.  That developing concept of what God would have to be led me to the realization that if I can define God then I’m claiming that I’m bigger than him, therefore I’m still my own god, which is certainly the secular humanist view of spirituality that is very common in our society today.  You can go over to Barnes and Noble or on to Amazon.com, you can buy 150 books on being your own god.  They don’t say you’re being your own god, but if you read the information they’re telling you to self-help, basically you’re being your own god as opposed to I no longer seek self-help, I seek God’s help.

      So coming to that conclusion. . .

M:    So you’re partying, you’re a manager at an auto dealership, you’re in Vegas, you meet Rickine.

PJ:   And I quit drinking and partying.

M:    Did you go through AA?

PJ:   I did.  I did go through the 12 steps.

M:    Did Rickine get you into that?

PJ:   She was already, 2 ½ years.  She’s got over 31 years, I’m coming up on 29.  I’m 2 ½ years behind her.  Certainly she was a impetus behind that, but when I first went to walk away from that, her response to me is, “If you want what I have, go get it the way I got it.”  That’s the last conversation about drug and alcohol recovery and counseling that we had.  I went about exploring that, working through that.  I was very anti-Christian.

M:    Were you calling yourself a Jew at that time?

PJ:   Absolutely not.  I had long since walked away from that.  I was pretty much nothing.  At the point that I was looking from spirituality in order to redefine life at 30, I guess men grow up a little slower than women, it was time to put our life in order.  We got to the place where that definition of understanding those core basic attributes, cuz I’m a thinking person, it was about finding a faith that fit those attributes that would allow for asking questions, because I’m a strong believer that blind faith is simply indoctrination, that if God is God then he would want us to ask the hard questions because if God is God and he’s revealing Himself to us he would want us to have those answers.  That process led me to a Bible study with a group of former outlaw bikers, we rode Harleys back then, in fact we just recently got rid of our bikes.  I went to a Bible study with a group of former outlaw bikers who had found Christ and changed their lives and now were ministering to other bikers.

M:    They invited you?

PJ:   My wife was attending it.  For about a year she hooked up with this Christian motorcycle group, of former hardcore bikers who now were preaching Jesus.  I was around them once in awhile but not very often.  She would go to this Bible study at one of their houses and she’d come home and, “Well, what did you talk about?”

      And she’d say, “The Bible.”  She wouldn’t tell me a thing.  They had been praying behind my back for a year.  Behind my back because if I knew they were praying I would have objected.

M:    For you?

PJ:   Yes.  They were praying diligently for me behind my back.  I would’ve certainly objected had I known that because I was pretty obstinant.

M:    Were you married at this point?

PJ:   Oh yea.  We’d been married 7 years, up to 8.  We were married 8 years when I got saved.

      At that Bible study, I was listening, they handed me a Bible, I don’t even know what the topic was that night, I couldn’t tell you, but they handed me a Bible and asked me to read the Gospel of John, Chapter 1, Verse 29.  It was my turn to read.  That was the first words I ever read in English in the Bible.  Remember, growing up Jewish in a conservative Jewish community, the Old Testament was read in Hebrew, and I didn’t understand Hebrew.

M:    And you hadn’t read the New Testament.

PJ:   I certainly wouldn’t have ever read the New Testament.  It was the first English words of the Bible that I had ever read.  And it was, “The next day John saw Jesus coming, said ‘Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.’”  As it’s been described, literally I began shaking, physically shaking to the point where the sofa I was sitting on seemed to be shaking.  Everybody in the room, except me, knew that I had been overcome by the power of the Holy Spirit.  At that moment, all that stuff that I had been taught in Hebrew school, in Sunday school, but it was on Saturdays, Friday nights, growing up, just came back in a moment and the sacrificial lamb of the Passover and all of the Jewish traditions, at that moment I realized that Jesus was the promised Messiah of the Jewish people of the Old Testament.  They prayed with me.  I couldn’t tell you what the prayer was.  We went home and a couple of days later we went to a local church that was very biker friendly, Grapevine Fellowship, about 1,000 people.  A very diverse group.

M:    Non-denominational?

PJ:   Four Square Church.  I said, “We’re gonna have to find a church cuz if I’m gonna do this Christian thing we’re gonna have to go find the right church.  Here’s the plan, Rickine, we’re gonna go each Sunday to a different church until we find the right one.”  We started with Grapevine because it was a known entity.  There were a lot of Christian bikers there as well as a very diverse group of people.  That first Sunday, my first pastor, Pastor Bud, preached a sermon that was absolutely directed right at me.  I responded to alter call.  We had been at Grapevine ever since until we came here.  That search for the right church lasted exactly one Sunday.  We were in the right church.

      I said to Rickine, “I gotta read the Bible.”  So we got a new King James version of the Bible.  I sat down and read it. . .we were gonna read it together but that lasted about an hour because I read so much faster than her and I was. . .I started at Genesis, Chapter 1 Verse 1, read it all the way through to the last verse of Revelation, in under five weeks.  Retained almost all of it.  That was while working a 70 hour work weeks, 75 hour work weeks.  So in my spare time, after working 70 plus hour work weeks, six days a week, I read the Bible cover-to-cover in barely over a month and pretty much retained the whole thing.  Did it again.  I actually read it cover-to-cover a second time even faster.

M:    Immediately following the first time?

PJ:   Yea.  I had almost total recall on what was in there.  More importantly than that, understood what I was reading.  Within a few weeks, within a month or two of becoming a Christian I was answering questions, Biblical questions, to guys who had been walking with the Lord for 20 years.  I was becoming the source and as I would go back and study commentaries of, you know, through the ages, from those who approached the Bible as the inspired word of God and that every word in it is truth.  Those commentaries were confirming what I already understood, what I was reading.  The next step was:  If God is God and those attributes are all right, then this Bible has to be flawless or worthless.  It can’t be any in between.  It would have to be flawless in the original language, because translating into English you’re going to lose things, particularly from ancient Greek which was a far more detailed language.  It would have to be in the original language, it would have to be in context for when it was written.  That’s the basic approach.

I began to study the Bible and I started with the Book of Genesis.  The first five chapters of Genesis.  I said, “Okay.  How am I going to do this?  I’m an educated man.  I’m very well read.  I will not accept this blind faith.

M:    You said you are educated.  Did you go to college?

PJ:   No.  I do not have a degree.  I have attended college.  I attended some college in my youth.

M:    So you mean self-educated.

PJ:   Right.  Some college in my youth.  I did not complete a degree.  I have gone back to Bible College and almost completed that degree; all Biblical courses.  I’m missing a couple general ed courses from my degree.

M:    Which college is that?

PJ:   Life Pacific in San Dimas.  I did it online and the old fashioned correspondence because I was still working and living in Vegas.  That did come later.

      I started to do this research.  “I have to find out if I can reconcile Christianity and thinking and an academic approach to things.”  My conclusion, for me, was unless the first five chapters of the Book of Genesis are truth – that would be creation through the flood – then what good is a dead Jewish carpenter with a missing body gonna do me?  The short version there is, what’s the crucifixion and the resurrection of Jesus Christ gonna do for me if the Bible is already flawed at the front?

      I grew up in public schools, was taught evolution apart from intelligent design, was told that . . . It was a lot less millions of years when I went to school.  One of the things I found out about evolution is that when my dad was being taught evolution it was thousands of years and hundreds of thousands of years, by the time I was in school it was tens of thousands and, maybe, a few million, and now they’re saying hundreds of millions of years.  The time keeps getting large enough to propagate the fraud that the universe is an accident.

      My faith walk went to an in-depth study of creation science.  Unless I can believe that what we see in the evidence of the universe around us can fit into what God has told us, I’m done with this.  I spent the next year or two becoming a. . .researching creation science.  I came to the conclusion that secular evolution apart from intelligent design is more of a religion than any church you could go to because it takes a greater leap of faith to connect the unconnected dots than it does to apply it to what the Bible says, cuz if you read what the Bible actually says, it fits what we actually see.  Since none of us were there. . .So to try to keep this in a reasonable amount of time, that conclusion led me to accept the basic premise that the Bible is the inspired word of God, that every word in it is true and accurate.  When not translated correctly or interpreted correctly, but when we go back and find out what the words actually meant in the original language.

M:    Did you study Greek and Latin at this time, too?

PJ:   The good news is we live in a computer age.  So, yes, I have Greek concordances, Hebrew concordances, I’ve got an entire library of them.  I will tell you that I rarely dust those books off any more because it’s a lot easier to click on the computer especially since I’m bi-vocational and don’t have 40-60 hours a week study time.  I’ve got maybe 20 hours a week study time.  I save a lot of that time by going to Greek concordances on the computer.  With a simple click I can get to the original language, I can get to the context, then I can go and do a search, if I need historical background for what was going on historically.  I try to bring some of that out in our teaching on Sunday.

M:    So you’re in the Grapevine Church. . .

PJ:   Yep.  I was at Grapevine.  Started moving up the ranks of service.  Started out, my first ministry was door greeter, which was a lot of fun.  I became an usher.  My pastor, my father, and our dog died within 60 days of each other.  Everyone knew that there was a call in my life but I didn’t quite understand it.  He did not gift me like this. . I’m the guy who. . .I read the recap of the football game in the newspaper and have to go back and recheck the score.  But when it comes to the Bible or other research that I have to do where God has called me to do it, as I’m finding out I have the same retention in the political field now that He gave me in the Bible, that was given for a reason.  That kind of retention and understanding was not from me.  That was beyond my capability.  So I understood that there was a call in my life.  I had one of those deep spiritual experiences where I heard, it seemed audibly but it wasn’t audibly, from God, calling me that he had a plan for me and that was that the day would come that I would pastor a church.

M:    So this is a specific moment?

PJ:   Yes.  4 o’clock in the morning.  Before my lasik surgery when I had to wear glasses to read.  Woke me up at 4 o’clock in the morning, sent me the Bible to read a couple of passages.  Clearly I heard the impression of God telling me that he had called me, he had set me apart to one day pastor the church and I needed prepare for that day.  The day would come in the future where I would pastor, where I would shepherd a flock for Him and teach his word.  So I went to my pastor and he said, “God will open a door.”  It was shortly after that that he died, my dad died.  My dad died first, then my pastor died, then our dog died.  My pastor’s son moved to Las Vegas to take over the church.  He became the pastor of the church.  He’s been my mentor and my pastor since.  One of the first things he set up at Grapevine was distance learning through Life Pacific College to allow people in Las Vegas to go to Bible College.

M:    Life Pacific is a Four Square college?

PJ:   Life Bible College, which is what it was called when I was going.

      My pastor instituted a distance learning. . . He understood the call in my life, he said, “This is how we’ll do it.”  I spent the next nine years mentoring under him, serving in various ministries at Grapevine, I was on the church council, I was at the same time managing a major car dealership in Las Vegas that I’d been with, at the end, 15 years, which is somewhat extraordinary in that industry.  Then one day they decided they were going to make some changes and I was one of those changes.  I was offered a different position and decided not to do that.  I was seeking God in prayer and he clearly told me, “I’m gonna take this away from you.”  This had to be divine intervention.  That’s a business where nobody gets advance notice that they’re going to be stepping down out of a senior management position, because I had power of the pen and the ability to, you know, buy cars.  I had more than a month’s advanced notice and was given a large severance package as part of retiring from that position.  Those things never happen in that industry.  It’s unheard of.  But my integrity was such that they trusted me to do as good a job on my last day as I did on my first and then wanted to make sure that this was not a hard feelings kind of thing.  I was offered another position that I decided not to take.  The reason I didn’t take it was because I got woke up at 4 o’clock in the morning understanding that God was telling me, “Remember when I told you” . . .

M:    This is the second time?

PJ:   Yeah!  Nine years later.  “Remember when I told you the day would come that I would ask you to shepherd a flock, pastor a church.  The future is now.”  The funny thing is, people had asked me, they knew I had a call in my life to one day be in the pastorate, and they said, “Where would you like to go?”

      I said, “A smaller town would be great.  Near to where you go fishing and camping.”

M:    Now you’re talking to people at the church?

PJ:   Yeah.  They said, “Where?
I said, “Smaller town.”  This is long before the call came to go.

      They said, “What about Utah?”

      I always said, “Utah sounds like way too much work.”  Cuz there’s a very dominant culture of faith up here.  Oddly enough. . .I heard that call, “The future is now, this is why we’re doing this.”

I went and sat down with my pastor.  I said, “I don’t know what to do, Pastor Dean.  God is telling me that this whole thing was laid out so that I can pastor a church.  I don’t even know where to start with something like that.  And, by the way, I haven’t told Rickine that I’ll be leaving my employment in two weeks, after fifteen years,” which was the scariest part of the whole deal.  Pastoring a church seemed like nothing compared to telling my wife that after 15 years our life was gonna get turned upside down.

My pastor’s response was, “I’m glad I’m not you.”  He said, “Obviously you need to go home and talk to Rickine and we need to start praying to figure out what God has in mind here cuz we’re missing an answer.  We know the time but we don’t know the place.  What do we do?”

So I went home and told Rickine and instead of panicking about our change of income, she jumped for joy and ran off to her computer.  Ran out of the room to her office.  I’m just sort of sitting back and watching and I didn’t even ask what she was doing.  It turns out that she spent about 30 or 40 minutes searching all over the United States for where she wanted to live.  By that time we had adopted Melinda, our 14 year old, she’s about three.  She loved the idea of not raising her in Las Vegas.  So she’s looking all over the country for where she’d want to live.  Then she suddenly stopped.  I’m sitting in the kitchen at the counter.  I can see her office that we built for her, and I’m just kind of watching her.  All of a sudden she just stopped.  Her countenance changed.  Then she went back to the computer.  What occurred was she stopped looking for where she wanted to live and started asking God where He wanted us to live.  At that moment He showed her St. George, Utah, and that there was no Four Square Church in St. George.  There was a Four Square Church in Cedar City.  There was a Four Square Church in Mesquite.  There was no Four Square Church in St. George.  At that moment she knew that we were supposed to come to St. George.  She walked out and said, “It’s St. George.”  I knew immediately. . .

M:    What year are we talking about?

PJ:   2005.  Well, 2004, cuz we moved here in 2005.  It’s 2004.  It’s late 2004.

      I knew immediately, it’s St. George.  I called my pastor and I said, “It’s St. George.”

      He said, “Oh, it is absolutely St. George.”  He called the district supervisor for the Four Square Church and said, “Jimi and Rickine are supposed to plant St. George, pioneer St. George.”

      He said, “That’s absolutely God.”

      The process of going through church plant training for the Four Square Church back then was a 1-2 year process.  In under 4 months we had completed the process, sold our home, and were living in St. George.

M:    Was training through Grapevine?

PJ:   No.  It was through Four Square.  For our district it was. . .we call it church planting.  I tend to use the term pioneer more here cuz it resonates better in the culture understanding it.  It was church planting intensive.  I had to get licensed as a pastor.  I was a licensed minster, but it was a staff level license that now had to be upgraded to a Senior Pastor’s license which meant additional interviews and training and evaluation.  Then an evaluation to see if we were someone who would be prone to having some success at church planting.  Church planting from scratch has a horrendous failure rate.  Very few of them make it.  They want to make sure you have the temperament.  The ability to plan.  We went through a whole series of training and interviews and evaluation.  The process can take up to two years if they feel that there’s things that you need to go back and work on spiritually or management-wise or administratively.  For us it was less than 4 months.  We completed the process in less than 4 months that normally takes up to 2 years.  Not only that but sold our home, found our home here, got our home remodeled, and were living here in St. George in less than 4 months, by the beginning of 2005.  I was, for a brief time, still commuting as I’d found another management position.  I was immediately hired to manage another car dealership down there, for a few months, and then the commute started to get old.  God opened up the door to manage a car dealership here, which I did for the first couple years we were up here.  Then we stepped away from that business 10 years ago, almost 10 years ago, nine years ago, because it was too many hours, the church was beginning to grow, and started a Bible Study in our living room.  You’re now sitting in the result 10 years later of what that Bible Study in our living room became.  We became a very community active church.  I’ve been pasturing ever since.

M:    So you moved here and just asked somebody, “Hey, you wanna come to a Bible Study in my living room?”

PJ:   Our church pioneer plan, our plant plan, was pretty basic.  There was funding available from Four Square but we weren’t gonna take that money until we were established.  So we thought, “The way to do this is to go up there, get plugged in to the community, find some Christians who were in need of a church, start a Bible Study in our home, and see what God does with it.”  Yea.  We met some Christians who did not have real church affiliations, started a Bible Study, a Sunday night Bible Study in our home towards the end of 2005.  We were here about 6 months before we actually started up the Bible Study, towards the end of 2005.  By a year later we had over 30 people meeting in our family room.  A sizable chunk of money. . .By then we had switched to a Sunday morning service in our family room.  A year later we had outgrown that and started looking for our first facility.  We moved in downtown at the 400 East facility where we were up until last July.  The rest, as they say, is history.  That’s the biographical side of how we got to where we are today.

M:    So when you began you’re not taking any Four Square money?

PJ:   The money that was available, we waited until we got our first facility, which we used for the purchase of. . .We had sufficient reserve of our own and enough of an offering/tithe base that we could cover the rent for the facility.  We didn’t need Four Square’s money for rent.  Our plan was to become an established church and then use the funding from Four Square to buy the kind of things that we couldn’t, that we would need to get a facility opened up:  like these tables, like those black chairs.  Those were the kind of things that we purchased.  The piano over there.  The electronic drums.  We bought the stuff that we, we used the funding from Four Square to finish out the facility that we needed at the time to get us started up, because we had seen other church planting efforts where they took that funding and used it to rent a facility on the basis that, “We will rent a facility.  We’ll get going and then we’ll grow enough to keep it going once the money runs out.”  What invariably would happen is that the money would run out before the offering base was able to supplement it and those churches died out.  We had the option and luxury of having a big enough family room in the house that we found here that we were able to grow to a stable size church.  Now those things rotate.  Church congregations will change drastically any time you move.  So a year after we got into that facility there was no one left from the living room.  We’re in another transition now as we are regrowing a congregation here because we moved from downtown to here.

M:    How long have you been here?

PJ:   July 1 is when we moved into this facility.

      Our ministry outreach was based on community needs, we’re very community active, we helped found the interfaith council, we work very interdenominationally on the interfaith.  I was one of the founding members of the interfaith council and served as both vice president and president of the interfaith council until the beginning of this year.

M:    Tell me about Four Square Churches.

PJ:   The International Church of the Four Square Gospel, commonly known as the Four Square Movement, is the spiritual covering that we’re under.  It’s almost 100 years old now.  It was founded by a female evangelist named Amy Semple McPherson who had a fascinating story.  She was raised a Methodist in Canada, was born again in the Pentecostal revival of Illinois and Chicago in the early, early 1900s.  Married and went on a mission assignment in mainland China in the late 1800s, early 1900s.  Her husband died in the mission field not to long after they got there, which left her in mainland China penniless, having to find her way back to America.  By God’s Grace she was able to get back here.  She became a traveling evangelist.  Traveled the nation in a tent ministry in an old Model A Ford and did giant revival meetings all over the country.  She eventually settled in California.  She built Angelus Temple in the 1920s.  It was built debt free.  It seated over 20,000 people a week, having over twenty services, standing room only, each week at Angelus Temple.  During the Great Depression the Four Square Movement, Angelus Temple, fed more people than the state of California.  She also had the first coast-to-coast national live radio broadcast in the history of radio, Four Square’s national broadcast.  In fact, we just sold the radio station 15 years ago.  It was built, along with Life Bible College, as a interdenominational, dedicated to the proposition of interdenominational world-wide evangelism.  It was never designed to be a denomination, and we’re not.  Independent churches started to coalesce around the concept of Four Square and the work that we’re doing in sending evangelists.  There are now over 58,000 Four Square Churches world-wide, less than 2,000 in the United States.  We are the largest Christian, other than the Catholic Church, in Brazil.  We’re the largest Christian faith in Cambodia, and Indonesia.  In fact, nearly half of the nation of Cambodia today, right now, is now Christian.  Cambodia is that close to being a Christian nation, a majority Christian nation.  This is the place where the killing fields were.  And more than half the Christians are Four Square in that country.

 So, great world-wide outreach, great disaster relief, feeding the hungry, based on a simple principle that God’s Word is the inspired word of God that we teach.  Keeping all things in balance without extremes of fanaticism.  God said what He meant, meant what He said.  Our job is simply to find out what those words meant in context.  Keep the Word of God in balance, not lifting any verse over any other.  Four Square stands for the fourfold ministry of Jesus Christ:  He’s our Savior, our Healer, the Baptizer with the Holy Spirit, and the soon coming King.

M:    So the Four Square is a Pentecostal Church.

PJ:   We are under the large umbrella of Pentecostal.  We’d be on the mild end of that spectrum.  Pentecostal has a bit of a bad rap because of some of the extremist movements within the Pentecostal umbrella.  But, yes, we are within the true definition-sense, part of that Pentecostal umbrella.  We’re on the mild side of it.

M:    What does it mean to be Pentecostal?

PJ:   To be Pentecostal means that we believe that the gifts of the Spirit are alive today.  That the Book of Acts is the only book of the Bible that, if you read that book, it has no ending, it just tails off in the middle of a thought with Paul on his way to Spain.  Every other book of the Bible has a conclusion to the book.  The Book of Acts doesn’t.  The reason is, the Book of Acts is still being written.  It’s just not being written in the . . .Like I like to say, “We’re in Chapter 2016 right now.”  What’s your Book of Acts story?  We believe that the gifts of the Spirit are alive today.  That the Jesus Christ is the same, yesterday, today, and forever.  You’ll see that on display at every Four Square Church in the world.  It means that God doesn’t change.  Therefore, all the things he did then, he still does now.  He still heals.  He still empowers us with the Holy Spirit in order to do ministry.  One of the evidences of that is what’s known as a prayer language, or speaking in tongues.

M:    Is it called the baptism of the Holy Spirit?

PJ:   Yes.  The baptism of the Holy Spirit is. . .

M:    You’re saved first.

PJ:   You’re saved, and at salvation there’s the indwelling of the Holy Spirit who takes residence in us and is our teacher, our guide, opening up the Word of God to us, taking the blinders off because the things of God are foolishness to those who are still perishing.  Once we have that enlightened moment when we realize who God is and that this all makes sense as I did on that sofa all those years ago.  The Holy Spirit becomes our guide and our teacher to reveal the truth of the Word of God to us.  He resides in us.  The baptism of the Holy Spirit, as we understand it, is an additional infilling of the Holy Spirit which is power to ministry.  It’s designed to empower us for whatever God has empowered us to do in our life.  That is the baptism of the Holy Spirit.  At the baptism of the Holy Spirit we are given the ability to pray in tongues.  We may not use it.  We may not develop it.  I certainly was on who waited years to explore that because I thought it was a little weird.  Praying in gibberish.  But what I came to understand was there are times. . .There are times I don’t know how to pray.  I may be driving down the street and God will put Matt on my radar.  You will just suddenly come to mind.  And I know that I’m supposed to be praying for your but I have no idea what your situation or circumstance is.  That’s where I have the gift of being able to pray in tongues, uttering sounds that I don’t need to know what they are, but it moves things in the spiritual realm, establishing the need that you have.  It may not be my business to know what your need was, but somebody needed to lift that need before God because He will never intervene in a situation to which he’s not invited.  So through the prayer language, which is the primary use of tongues, I’m able to pray for people in a situation where I may not know what their needs are.

M:    Do you ever do that publicly, during services?

PJ:   I have prayed with people, if I’m praying over somebody, there are times that I will, if I don’t know their situation, I often pray in English, but sometimes I’ll break in.  There are biblically, not mandated, there are biblically acceptable uses of tongues in a public setting.  Primarily, tongues is for, and this is where the Pentecostal movement sometimes goes off the rails.

M:    It distinguishes you from some other Pentecostal. . .Like the Assemblies of God, for instance.

PJ:   Assemblies of God doctrinally are the same as Four Square.  Identical doctrine.  Just a different church government.  There statement of faith is. .

M:    This is public knowledge, I’m gonna tell a story.  I’ve been to New Beginnings Christian Fellowship out in Washington.

PJ:   I know the pastor well.

M:    Jonathan.  Part of their service, I’m putting this in quotes, is “kind of weird.”  They’re speaking in tongues.  There are people fainting.  I don’t see that happening. . .is there a distinction?

PJ:   I will tell you that, for me, here’s what the Bible says about tongues.  Again, the statement of faith is the same for Assemblies of God.  I do believe, and I’m not talking about Pastor Jonathan or New Beginnings, because obviously I’ve never been to one of his services.  I can tell you what I believe about tongues, and what I believe about genuine Pentecostal Christianity as God has shown it to me and as it’s practiced in most Four Square Churches.  I will tell you that I’ve been to a Four Square Church where I walked in the door and the Holy Spirit impressed upon me immediately that what I was about to see was not Him.  What I saw was a pastor laying on the ground making noises, people falling out on the floor, making animal sounds, chaos on the service.  As clear as anything else I’ve heard from God, He said, “I need you to see this.  This is not Me.”  I decided I needed to understand the proper place for the Pentecostal movement and what tongues really is.  Very learned, brilliant men who’ve written the books on this stuff, “Here’s what that is.”

      The public display of tongues is for the edification of the body and to reach the unbeliever.  If someone breaks out into tongues in a proper, healthy Pentecostal Church, it would be one individual who suddenly breaks out in a public display of tongues.  At that point, we’re mandated that everything stops.  We just stop the service.  If we’re in the middle of a worship set and somebody breaks out in tongues, we are stopping right then and there, and we are waiting for what the Bible says is going to happen next, and that’s the interpretation.  Public use of tongues will not be done. . .

M:    Has this happened in your church before?

PJ:   It’s happened at Grape Vine.  It has not happened here at Solomon’s Porch save one or two times.  It has happened a couple of times over the ten years that we’ve been here.

      At that point someone is going to receive the message of what was just said.  In a public display of tongues, the Biblical reference for this is in 1 Corinthians because Paul went into a church where there was chaos and people talking in tongues and he said, “This isn’t God.”  If someone speaks in tongues it’s gonna be one or two people and it will always be accompanied by an interpretation.  It’s probably not the person who spoke in tongues that would be the one interpreting it, although that wouldn’t be impossible.  Usually there’s somebody in the room who is just shaking in their seat because they know they just got the interpretation and they’re afraid to say it, or they’re mature enough in their Christianity that they’re willing to say it and we’ll will receive that interpretation.  Then we’ll move on with service and praise God.  If no interpretation comes and I sense that somebody was just acting out I will cover that and speak to it and then counsel that person privately later that maybe they weren’t hearing from God because we didn’t receive interpretation.  I’m not going to embarrass them in front of the congregation because there is no benefit to the Kingdom of God in doing that.

      Look.  Rolling on the floor, making animal sounds, is nowhere in the Bible.  It’s just not Biblical, it’s not scriptural.  If there is a Pentecostal Church that is having chaos, I call that a dog and pony show, not a move of the Holy Spirit.  I’m not judging any other church.  In fact, I wish you hadn’t mentioned which church it was.

M:    Sorry.  Other than it was in a public setting and anybody could have been there and watched it.  I’m just trying to get the difference. . .

PJ:   I’m telling you what the Bible says about this and that is that . . .Now, if we have a prayer session in church, from time-to-time we will do that if anybody needs prayer.  Sometimes we’ll break into small prayer circles.  If you need prayer for healing or a situation, you want me to pray with you, come up and pray, many times I’ll pray with that person and tongues will be involved.  Again, the primary purpose of tongues is as a prayer language, when we don’t know how to pray. . .

M:    You do encourage a certain physicality in your services.  You encourage people to dance and sing. . .

PJ:   Absolutely.  That is absolutely scriptural.  There are even churches where. . .We had a lady who used to bring a little banner and wave it and dance.  That’s absolutely Biblical.  Worship, both in song and word, can be a very spiritually moving experience.  We can be very moved in the experience.  I have prayed over people who, where the Holy Spirit has knocked them down.  Unlike some, I’ve never pushed anyone down for affect.  I actually had someone pray over me who tried to give me a little help going down and that told me something intuitive about his ministry.  He had crossed a line.  I have laid hands and prayed over somebody and had them just hit the ground.  I was overcome by the Holy Spirit at that Bible Study when I first got saved and I’ve certainly been with people in service that have been clearly moved by the Holy Spirit.

M:    What about the Four Square, the healing part?  Is medical help okay with you?

PJ:   Absolutely.  God heals in three different ways.  He’ll either heal by his miracle hand, which is always our first and primary prayer, that he would radically and completely restore you to wholeness by his miracle hand.  The second way God heals is through the hand of a doctor.  We have many people who have come through that ask about prescribed medications.  We reply, “You take your medications as prescribed.”  If you have a chemical imbalance that needs medical treatment and you’re on medication, you don’t go off that medication expecting God to do it.  God is healing you through that medication.

M:    So there is no contradiction there?

PJ:   No contradiction at all, cuz God is still getting the glory.  He is the one who healed you.  He may heal you through his miracle hand, He may choose to heal you through the hand of a doctor, and there will always be a reason because, remember, God heals us first of all because He wants us to be whole, second of all as a testimony of His power.  By healing us through the hand of a doctor, and us giving glory to God, we have the opportunity to witness who He is and spread the gospel of grace.

      The third way God heals is by taking you home, which is the ultimate healing, because, for the Christian there is no death.  For the Christian there is no death.  Our last breath here is preceded by our first breath in the presence of the Lord.  For some, that is the ultimate healing.  God can choose whichever means because he is God and He gets to make all the choices by which means he chooses to heal.  The one thing we know from a Biblical standpoint is that every Bible-believing Christian who seeks God for healing is healed in one of those fashions.  Jesus has never denied someone a healing.

M:    They’re all healed by the third one, right?

PJ:   Yeah.  He has his option and we’re completely healed by that one.  If it’s our time to go.

M:    What about baptisms?

PJ:   There are two ordinances of the church that the Four Square Church participates in.  The first is the Lord’s Supper, that’s communion.  The bread and the wine, we use grape juice here because we have people who don’t drink.  The second is water baptism by immersion.  Those were given to us by the Lord.  Those are the two ordinances.

M:    Age of consent?

PJ:   Age of consent.  When you can explain you salvation to me you can be baptized.  The youngest person we’ve baptized in this church was 7 or 8.  The oldest was in their 90s.  We’ve done first time baptisms and we’ve done people who’ve been rebaptized because there was a major life change that they felt the needed/wanted to back into the water.

M:    Communion?  Can anybody take it in your church?

PJ:   Yeah.  If you are a child of God.  If Jesus is your Lord and savior and you’re a child of God then you’re welcome at the Lord’s table.

M:    It’s up to the individual to make that decision?

PJ:   Absolutely.  We serve open communion, which means anyone can take communion.  Baptism is simply an outward display of the inward work that God has done in us.  You’re not baptized into the Four Square movement.  You’re not baptized into any particular church.  You are baptized as a public display of what God’s done on the inside.

M:    Finally, what about your community outreach?  Where does that come from?

PJ:   We saw a need, we met a need.  It started innocently enough.  Going all the way back to Bible study in our living room, we have always shared our Sunday mean together as a church.  In churches of any size what ends up happening is right after church everyone scatters and tries to beat the Baptists to the Applebee’s.  In those situations the pastor usually ends up with a tight knit group of 6 or 8 people at most, sometimes smaller, that they have lunch with every single Sunday.  It was like that at Grapevine.  We had lunch every week with the pastor and there was a tight-knit group of the staff, we ate our Sunday meals together.  We decided we wanted to do this, we also had some single moms and that, so we did a potluck-style, what we call the Love Feast.  We had our Sunday meal together as family.  We continued to do that when we opened our first facility.  After awhile we started noticing that there were – we were downtown – we started to notice there were people showing up that weren’t necessarily there for service.  We knew that because it was in the same room.  We started out downstairs.  Of course we didn’t turn them away.  We realized that there were homeless people from the community that figured out there was food there and started coming to eat.  So we fed them.  It continued to grow.  Word traveled fast.  It continued to grow.  It morphed into the Sunday Feast.  We outreached to the community to say, we found out that. . .We were helping Grace Episcopal which does the soup kitchen reorganize their covering because they had some administrative issues.  In the process of doing that we found out that there was no one in St. George that was feeding the elderly and homeless community on a weekend.  That’s when we reached out to the food bank.  We also received a grant from LDS Humanitarian Services through the Bishop Storehouse.  And the Sunday Feast was born.  It expanded to the Friday Food Pantry.

M:    Is this a typical Four Square thing?

PJ:   Grapevine in Las Vegas has a food pantry.  I mentioned Angelus Temple.  It’s in our DNA.  Angelus Temple fed more people than the State of California during the Depression.  It is certainly in Four Square’s DNA.  It fits within the model of interdenominational worldwide evangelism.  It fits in the denomination of meeting the needs of the people.  It fits within the Book of Acts model for the Church.  The Church in the Book of Acts shared their meals together.  If you read the Book of Acts, those first Christians, they met together on the first day of the week, which was Sunday, they had their meals together, they were a family unit.  So food is a integral part of Biblical Christianity as it was practiced in the 1^st Century, which is what we try to pattern our church after.  Remember, Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever.  It’s how he designed this thing.  Food is also a great bridge of outreach to be able to have conversation, develop relationship, and connect people with needs that will change their life both spiritual and physical.