I was an Afrikaner child during the 1960s in Apartheid South Africa. It was literally a black and white world, with clear boundaries. For an Afrikaner white boy, the principles of segregation and subjugation of races under white-rule were how God ordered the world. To be an Afrikaner was to believe these principles. To question this was to question God and find fault with how he had determined things to be. That would be a sin.

In the past, being white was considered superior in society. Being a white male gave individuals access to power and authority. If you were also a Calvinist Christian, you were considered to be one of God's chosen people. In this system, people were judged based on rules and labels. The rules determined where individuals belonged in society, and the labels determined who was worthy and who was not. I used to believe that if you followed the rules and accepted the labels given to you, life would be good.

As a boy, I grew up in a Pentecostal church in a small city outside of Johannesburg in South Africa. Pentecostalism wasn’t part of mainstream Christianity then; we were often ridiculed for our faith. I remember conversations - or maybe they were more like debates - with school friends about doctrines like charismatic gifts, believers’ baptism and freedom of choice, election and predestination. From a young age, I was passionate about what I believed, but I often found that my passion did not keep up with my ability to explain my faith. I often found myself retreating into the stance that you may take away everything, but you can’t take away my experience. 

Imprinted in my memory is the image of our pastor’s hand on someone’s head, with the veins bulging in his neck as he called on God to bring deliverance. That head was often mine; I needed prayer more often than most. There was always olive oil and tissues available to invoke the Spirit’s presence and to deal with the nasal consequences of the Spirit’s work, respectively. I was baptized soon after my eighth birthday and experienced ‘baptism in the Spirit’ in that same year. These baptisms shaped my faith and spirituality as a child. I agree with Steve Land when he describes water baptism as:  “…the acceptance to become a holy witness in the power of the Holy Spirit. It was a death and resurrection ritual of remembrances and hope.”(2) 

While these sermons shaped my personal piety, they did little, if anything, to expose and deal with the deep-seated racism I nurtured as a young South African male. I did not experience the in-breaking of God’s Kingdom to bring healing, transformation and reconciling power over all of God's creation. While the Kingdom of God may be the ‘key theological motif for Pentecostal spirituality in its search of a holistic vision’(3) it was not my experience. 

I agree with Kärkkäinen that Pentecostalism is an "interesting mixture of Anabaptist, Wesleyan-Holiness, and Catholic heritages focusing on the inner transformation of the person as the key to social transformation. Pentecostalism has come to emphasize that 'The rebirth of a person by the Spirit is the anticipation of the transformation of the cosmos.'(4) While I did experience Pentecostalism’s emphasis on the ‘rebirth of a person by the Spirit’, I did not experience that rebirth as ‘anticipation of the transformation of the cosmos’.

Today, after many years, I can agree with Kärkkäinen5, that Pentecostalism taken to its logical conclusion could expect that: "The person filled by the Spirit of God is impelled by that same Spirit to cooperate with God in the work of evangelism and social action in the anticipation of the new creation."4 But that expectation was foreign to the Pentecostalism of my youth. There was simply no place for that kind of integration.

At age eighteen, I found myself ready to respond to what I believed was God’s call on my life to become a pastor. Giving up my dreams to be an engineer, I set off for the local university to study theology.