Belief Series: Four Square Pentecostal

Next to North Elementary school sits a small house like church that can easily be over looked if one doesn’t know where they are going.

Or one would be acutely aware of where the church is, thanks to North Elementary school.

Either way this small homey church is a Four Square Church, a Christian denomination headed by Pastor Kelvin Boltjes since 1986.

The pastor wasn’t always a Four Square Christian, as a child he grew up within the Presbyterian Church in Otis, Colo. and in the beginning of his married life he and his wife were Methodists.

It was during his years as a Methodist that he got the calling from God to convert and become the head of a church.

The pastor and his wife were actually living in Sterling, Colo. when the call from God came.

“Back in 1978 is when I got the call to go into the ministry. My wife and I were attending a Methodist church at the time, and in the course of the next few months God kept putting all these Four Square people in our lives,” he began to explain his path.

“My grandmother was a Four Square pastor. I have an uncle in Denver who has been Four Square for 60 some years. They just asked me to go to Los Angeles to look at Life Bible College. I’d looked at three different colleges, and when I finally took the trip out I just fell in love with everything they were doing,” he said.

“I was able to sit down and talk to the president of Four Square, who is the founder’s son, which was kind of different. Ordinarily you wouldn’t get to do something like that, he explained a lot about what I didn’t know about Four Square.From that point I came home and told my wife we are loading up the three kids and moving to Los Angeles.”

Pastor Boltjes was 26-years-old when the life changing decision was made to not only move away from the area he knew so well, but to completely convert from Methodist to Four Square Pentecostal.

The conversion wasn’t a big leap, Pastor Boltjes said, because they are all of a Christian belief system.

“There is no change of religion they believe the same doctrines, they just do things a little bit differently in their church services,” he explained saying that “we believe in the Holy Trinity, the death and resurrection of Jesus, that he is the our Lord and Savior, we have all that in common.

“And we always say we have the cross in common if nothing else. The biggest thing that would separate us is the way we do our worship services. In our worship service we usually have maybe five or six contemporary Christian songs that are sung all together, whereas another Christian church may do a hymn do something else and come back and do a hymn again.”

Another of the differences Pastor Boltjes said there may be within this dogma from another Christian based canon, “How we embrace the gifts of God. The gifts of the Holy Spirit. However, a lot of other churches don’t recognize the gifts as being active today or for today. But we believe the Bible is for us today as it was for us 2,000 years ago or believers before that when they only had the Torah.

“That will probably be the biggest difference is that we do believe in the manifestation of the gifts. However, when we talk about gifts most people will only think about the gifts of the Holy Spirit. We do preach and teach all of them, not just tongues all of them, as found in First Corinthians. But we also teach about the gifts of the Father as found in the book of Romans and the gifts of the Son as found in Ephesians. So what we see is the Holy Trinity giving gifts for each of the areas of ministry he would like us to be active in.”

“We are a Pentecostal, but we are not the wild eyed Pentecostals that most people think of, we don’t handle snakes,” he chuckled, “I’m afraid of snakes. Those things are things people do to temp God. We are not Holy Rollers.

“What Pentecostalism is to us is the prophetic word from God that was given to the prophet Joel in the Old Testament that one day he would pour his spirit onto all flesh. On the day of Pentecost that came into fulfillment. It was at that time that in the believers the Holy Spirit began dwelling in them, before that the Holy Spirit would just come upon somebody to do something for God. But now that has all changed - the Holy Spirit lives in us.

“That is part of what being Four Square is all about. It is a prophetic move of God within our life. Then that allows us to have a very personal relationship with Jesus our Lord and Savior. That is cool when you think about it. He is the creator of the universe, the world and that gives us an opportunity to have that personal relationship with him.”

The Four Square belief also recognizes gifts from God bestowed upon his church as other Christian dogmas state.

“The gifts empowers us to be God’s witnesses in the world, it empowers us to do his will. And when we start talking about God’s will, it is that we would become Christ like. Not that we could ever become like Jesus himself, but we can do our best to use him as our model, saying this is how we want to live our lives.

“And the power of God is really God’s love. That is what we really try to get across to people, that God does love them. That is the good news,” he said about God’s love, “we can be forgiven our sins, our shortcomings, our mistakes, and that makes us a whole person. And that is what being Pentecostal is about to Four Square people.”

According to Pastor Boltjes baptism is just as important to the Four Square Church as any other Christian based church.

And as many other Christian based churches, he said, they believe in leaving the decision of baptism up to the individual, looking at baptism of a baby as a dedication ceremony instead of the actual meaning of baptism.

“If the parents would like to have a baby or child dedicated we will do that for them, but baptism we believe comes later,” he began to explain the discipline’s view on baptism. “We do baptize by emersion. Baptism is an identification with Jesus’s death and going into the grave, which is us going underneath the water, then coming back up is our recognition of his resurrection that we might have the power over death that he has given us as a gift.

“Sometimes we can’t do that because someone may be in the hospital.I did a baptism on I-80 one day. A man was in a car accident and thought he was dying and when he found out I was a minister he wanted to be baptized, so I did that, for him. He survived and is doing fine, he lives in Texas, but for the most part baptism is a very personal thing.When somebody receives Christ as their Lord and Savior that is the next step, for them to be obedient in baptism.”

Pastor Boltjes said his faith has been incredibly strong, especially within this Christian based canon, because he has been able to see how God has moved in his life, and in his daughter’s life – a child he lost when she was 34 years old.