Integration of Learning and Faith

The believers within our Pentecostal tradition, despite some historical presupposition against education, have generally strived to receive and impart knowledge much higher than what secular science can offer. Our paradigm of integration of faith and learning has come from a personal experience of knowing God rather than scientific method, and in a way it has become our own scientific method of testing truth beyond our religious context into daily life.

Similarly, being formed in the Spirit impacts our lives holistically, even the areas of our deepest doubts, our most serious suspicions and our greatest fears. It is there that true discoveries occur and where we realize that we know not the cosmos, the earth, our land, our families and even ourselves unless we first know God. Faith and learning become a personal spiritual quest, which reaches beyond just a Christian worldview or interpretation of faith and reason, to our very beings and change us.

In my case, faith and learning developed from my personal experience as a fifth generation Pentecostal believer and Spirit-filled minister. I can truly say that it has been a journey of reaching and a quest of finding, one that has changed me forever. Education did not make me a minister of the Gospel, nor did it have the power to do so, but it most certainly made me a better minister and a servant of the Kingdom.

Along the way, God used teachers who did much more than just deliver content in classrooms, but established the faith into our hearts and minds. In my journey, they have become road markers who knew God and made Him known to others. The passion to become personally such a milestone in the spiritual journey of others has been the greatest challenge for integration of faith and learning within both our ministry and personal Pentecostal experience. For our journey with God should not be without a destination or an end. It should be about actually getting there, at the place and reality where Scripture declares with most definite certainty that “we shall know.”