'I Was in the Spirit on the Lord's Day': A Pentecostal Engagement with Worship in the Apocalypse

Synopsis

In this monograph Dr Melissa Archer offers a comprehensive study of the theme of worship in the Apocalypse. In the first chapter she presents a survey of the modern literature devoted to various aspects of worship in the book. In chapter two she constructs a Pentecostal reading strategy informed by the history of the Pentecostal movement and the contemporary conversations with regard to the emerging discipline of Pentecostal hermeneutics. The third chapter offers a history of the effect the worship themes from Revelation had on early Pentecostal readers as revealed in the Pentecostal periodical literature of the movement's first decade. The fourth chapter offers a narrative reading of all the texts devoted to worship in the Apocalypse. In the fifth chapter, Archer proposes a Pentecostal theology of worship constructed by placing into dialogue the results of her study of the role of worship in the Apocalypse with scholarly work on Pentecostal worship. This cutting edge work is destined to make a significant contribution both to the theme of worship in the academic study of the Apocalypse and the construction of a distinctively Pentecostal theology of worship. It is a model of an integrated Pentecostal approach to Scripture that offers a paradigm for others interested in engaging the biblical text from a Pentecostal context.