On September 15, 1974, I officially joined the Assemblies of God. This church teaches that the Bible is infallible. What Bible? Unofficially, members believed that the Bible of choice was the rigorously condensed King James Bible, an edition with no Preface, no variant readings or footnotes, abbreviated books of Esther and Daniel, and the complete omission of Tobit, Judith, Baruch, Jesus ben Sirach, Wisdom of Solomon, The Prayer of Manasseh, both books of Esdras, and both of Maccabees. Sexual allusions in the Old Testament -- no matter how slight -- were purposefully modified or deleted (yet detailed descriptions of horror and violence were retained in full) ostensibly to make the work a "family Bible." In the New Testament, John's Gospel was translated from late manuscripts that had been deliberately altered to modify John's slighting references to Peter. These were just some of the faults of the Bible regarded as infallible by the entire congregation except the Pastor and myself. To their credit, the hierarchy of the Assemblies of God did make an effort to wean people away from their beloved King James, but to little avail.

The Assemblies of God is the world's largest Pentecostal denomination. Yet here they were, trying to teach people about the Holy Spirit without a Biblical text book. Although there are two such text books in the Bible, detailing not only the character and functions of the Holy Spirit but ways in which the Holy Spirit can be invited into a person's life, they could not use either of them, because they were not included in the little King James Bible all the people were using. So they had to fall back on personal experience.

One Sunday night, we had a guest speaker, a pastor in his eighties who'd spent his entire lifetime seeking the Holy Spirit. He told us what he'd found out through personal experience over 65 years. I didn't have the heart to tell him after the service that in two seconds flat he could have found out all and far more than what he'd so painstakingly gleaned over 65 years simply by opening a Bible -- a real Bible -- and turning to chapters 6 through 9 of Wisdom.