Pentecostals are ideally positioned to recover and re-vision lament praxis for themselves and the wider church today, due to their distinctive understanding of prayer, crisis, glossolalia, prophecy and God’s dynamic in-breaking presence.

Narelle Melton

Narelle Melton is Senior Tutor in Old Testament at Southern Cross College.

• Link: Narelle Melton — Narelle’s profile page on alphacrucis.edu.au

SCC RevEAL 0901

The upbeat, positive tone of Pentecostal services is often noted.  For some people, encountering the drive and energy can be life changing. It provides new vision, new hope that the Christianity that they have had might yet have life in it. Yet for others, a culture of relentless positivity can sometimes be read as judgemental — as squeezing the person who is incapable of sustaining that positivity to the side.  As Uniting Church minister and press commentator David Millikan has noted, there isn’t much room for melancholy in the modern Pentecostal church.  Yet there are times when melancholy is suitable – either when it is unavoidable for medical or other reasons, or when it is time to weep with those who weep.  A spirituality without the ability to engage the full width of human emotions, the full width of scripture, risks projecting an image of itself (if not a reality) which is shallow and sub-Christian.

Taking on this task of helping Pentecostal spirituality meet both its historical experience and its scriptural bedrock is SCC Senior Tutor in Old Testament, Narelle Melton. Narelle, a trained nurse who has seen enough human suffering to know the need to be able to engage with performance of human experience, has applied her skills in Old Testament hermeneutics to the Psalms and the practice of lament.  Only the rediscovery of lament, she says, can provide ‘a sure voice for this pain and permission to appeal to God for intervention’ in the many grievous situations facing the world today.

The lament Psalmists detailed a relationship with God that was frank and candid, where the cry of anguish, protest of anger and questioning of covenantal-injustices could be manifest. Nonetheless, Israel’s psalmists did not falter in their faith, for a transition in mood from … plea to praise, somehow occurred.

Using Paul Ricoeur’s Interpretation Theory, Ms Melton asked “Is there a correspondence between the form of the biblical lament psalms and the early Australian Pentecostal practice of prayer?”

Her fascinating study pays off in what Prof. Lee Roy Martin of The Church of God Theological Seminary in the USA has called ‘an informative, stimulating, and constructive contribution to Pentecostal scholarship.’  Using the extensive Australian Pentecostal historical sources at Southern Cross College’s Pentecostal Heritage Centre, Ms Melton identifies a “change of mood from plea to praise, as in the lament psalms, … clearly portrayed within [early Pentecostal] experiences of tarrying and ‘praying-through.’” In addition, the ‘sighs, groans and laughter’, the importance of ‘crisis’ in early Pentecostal worship map closely to the patterns observed within the lament psalms, suggesting a ‘natural affinity’ with the latter’s transition ‘from distress to relief’. But how was she to confirm this?

Using the advanced search functions in the Heritage Centre’s database, Ms Melton discovered in early Pentecostal journals (such as the Australian Evangel, and the Good News) a total of 574 individual articles in which 11 key lament-related terms were used. In what Professor Martin calls ‘superb analysis and evaluation’ Narelle uncovers a range of direct (ie. 6/7) matches with the classic form of the lament psalm, ranging ‘from appeals for healing from sickness, testimonial accounts of Holy Spirit baptism, and general prayer petitions’. In many other cases there were less direct matches, as compared to ‘the majority of the biblical lament psalms (76%) [which] showed a “6 & 7 point” correspondence with the form-elements’. The one ‘significant omission’ from early Pentecostal prayers? “This was that the early Australian Pentecostal prayer occasions did not display a ‘complaint against God’” so common in the Old Testament.

Melton concludes that Australian Pentecostals have lost something in adopting a ‘drive through’ spirituality, in discontinuing such practices as tarrying, prayer for healing, and the like. On the other hand, she also concludes that the connection to a deeper spirituality is latent in our history and experience. Indeed, ‘Pentecostals are ideally positioned to recover and re-vision lament praxis for themselves and the wider church today, due to their distinctive understanding of prayer, crisis, glossolalia, prophecy and God’s dynamic in-breaking presence.’

Well done, Narelle, in developing (in Professor Martin’s words), ‘an accomplished integration of thorough research, critical analysis, and theological perception’ which ‘makes a significant contribution to the fields of biblical studies, historical theology, and Pentecostal spirituality.’

If you are interested in the sort of work being done in SCC’s Research Culture, contact: Dr Mark Hutchinson, Dean, Academic Advancement, Southern Cross College (mark.hutchinson@scc.edu.au)