Carnett: A little Pentecostal envy: What’s wrong with emoting?

I remember summer Sunday evenings spent hiding in the bushes outside a small Pentecostal church on Costa Mesa’s Eastside.

I’d listen with fascination to the raucous assembly through the open windows. It was a worship style unlike any I’d ever witnessed.

My two younger siblings and I were Lutherans. We attended Sunday school and church every Sabbath at a staid and venerated Orange County church.

I was an acolyte. My mom was the church’s secretary and Sunday school superintendent, and my dad was a member of the church council.

We were solid, even slightly mildewed, Lutherans. We sang formal liturgy out of the Lutheran hymnal Sunday mornings, accompanied by an organ, a robed pastor and a robed choir. We’d been sprinkled for baptism and took communion monthly at the altar.

On Easter Sundays, as an acolyte, I’d light candles at every pew, plus those on the altar. I’d march down the center aisle to the altar during the processional hymn, ahead of the pastor and the choir, carrying the gold cross of Christ.

In addition to the beautiful liturgy, we regularly sang such Lutheran anthems as “A Mighty Fortress is Our God,” “Holy, Holy, Holy,” “Beautiful Savior,” “Crown Him With Many Crowns” and “I Know That My Redeemer Lives.”

In 1957 — when I was 12 — I had a friend in my confirmation class who lived in Costa Mesa just down the street from a small Pentecostal congregation. Out of curiosity, I looked one day through the front door of that church and saw that it didn’t have an altar with a cross, candles or two pulpits like we had.

It featured a platform, a couple of chairs and a lectern.

As Lutherans, we attended church Sunday mornings, period. Except, of course, during the season of Lent, when we went Wednesday evenings to Lenten vespers.

The Pentecostals? Well, they seemed to utilize every opportunity to worship in ways baffling to our Lutheran sensibilities. They’d regularly meet Sunday mornings, Sunday nights and Wednesday nights. We derisively labeled them Holy Rollers.

Sometimes on Sunday evenings my family would visit my friend’s family for dinner. In summers, after dinner, he and I would steal down to the Pentecostal church, hide outside and listen to the songs, accompanied by an unruly piano and an assortment of drums and tambourines.

Though we’d laugh, I secretly wanted to go in. I was fascinated. Maybe we Lutherans were missing something. I naturally assumed they worshipped the same Jesus that we did, just in a slightly different — perhaps more impassioned — manner.

At Sunday night services they sang enthusiastically — much louder than we did on Sunday mornings — such hymns as “Power in the Blood,” “When We All Get to Heaven,” “Victory in Jesus,” “Highway to Heaven,” “The Old Rugged Cross” and “I Come to the Garden Alone.”

My friend and I would snicker. “Listen to those Holy Rollers,” we’d bellow. I didn’t know any of their hymns at the time, but I’ve since come to love them.

During the Sunday night sermon, the preacher — dressed in a suit, not a robe — would shout out his sermons. His call-and-response style was not at all like the sometimes-droning sermons preached by my pastor.

Congregants would interrupt his animated remarks with shout-backs of “Amen!” and “Hallelujah!” and “Praise the Lord!”

Had somebody similarly shouted out during my Lutheran pastor’s sermon, we’d have been mortified. We’d undoubtedly have responded with embarrassed silence.

As my friend and I hid in the Pentecostal bushes, we ridiculed loudly, and a deacon would invariably come out to chase us away. We’d chortle all the way back to my friend’s house.

Yet, I never forgot those Pentecostals. I liked their unfettered sentiment and lack of pretentiousness. Years later, I became a non-liturgical evangelical myself and was dunked in the River Jordan during a trip to Israel.

I still love the Lutheran liturgy, but I also appreciate the freedom to emote.

JIM CARNETT, who lives in Costa Mesa, worked for Orange Coast College for 37 years.