Pentecostals
Jan. 6: The Feast of the Epiphany. The day that marks the revelation of God’s incarnation in Jesus Christ. It was an important day in my family growing up. On “King’s Day,'' in Puerto Rican custom, children would go to the fields and pick grass to leave under their beds. By the next morning, the “Magi” would have already visited — leaving presents in lieu of grass, their camels well-fed from the grass for their journey to the next house.
The neighborhood has long been home to numerous historic and not-so-historic houses of worship of nearly every size and type. Here you can find congregations of Muslims, Hebrew Israelites, AMEs, Baptists, Presbyterians, Pentecostals, and everything else in between.
So who cares if a few churches have to be razed to make Harlem “great again,” right?
I do.
White, an early and enthusiastic Trump backer, organized national gatherings of evangelical leaders on his behalf, and spoke at a Trump rally on the campus of the University of Central Florida. She also delivered the benediction on the first night of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.
White will be only the second woman to pray at an inauguration. And, together with Bishop Wayne T. Jackson of Great Faith Ministries International, who will deliver another of the inaugural benedictions, she will be among the few outspoken advocates of the “prosperity gospel” to appear at an inaugural in recent memory.
Hollywood star Denzel Washington, the son of a pastor, preached a sermon of gratefulness Nov. 7 to hundreds of members of the Church of God in Christ at their annual Holy Congregation in downtown St. Louis.
“I pray that you put your slippers way under your bed at night, so that when you wake in the morning you have to start on your knees to find them. And while you’re down there, say thank you,” he told the crowd at a $200-a-plate banquet at the Marriott St. Louis Grand Hotel to raise money for the denomination’s charity work.
“It is impossible to be grateful and hateful at the same time,” he said.
“We have to have an attitude of gratitude.”
The couple practiced Candomble, an African-Brazilian faith with roots in Brazil’s slave trade.
They dressed in white and believed in an all-powerful God who is served by lesser deities, blending Catholicism with African spiritualism, or the belief that the dead communicate with the living.
But their neighbor, who attended a local evangelical church, disapproved. On a balmy day one year ago he shot and killed the husband as he was screwing in a light bulb in his yard.
Pentecostals may be the least known and most unpredictable group on the landscape.
Latino Pentecostals are increasingly seeing political action as an act of faith.