Dr Antipas Harris is an ordained minister, a theological educator, and a musician. He has ministered across the US and Canada, as well as in Germany, Mexico, Nigeria, Angola, and South Africa. He was a speaker at the Global Pentecostal Summit last November at City Harvest Church in Singapore.
Dr Antipas is also a public theologian. In his 30 years of ministry, Dr Antipas has mentored ministers in leadership, and regularly speaks on topics related to leadership, spirituality, theology, biblical studies, community engagement, and social justice. He has held public classes and panel discussions on politics and faith, gentrification, and immigration. He has served as a faculty staff of Regent University, Vanguard University, Sacred Heart University, George Fox University, and Old Dominion University, where he currently teaches courses in the Philosophy and Religious Studies department. He is also the former founding president of Jakes Divinity School in Texas. Dr Antipas is an established scholar with several books and articles in refereed journals.
Knowledge meets action in his role as founder and president of the Urban Renewal Center in Virginia, which focuses on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), youth empowerment, the problem of homelessness, and offers research-based education, DEI consulting, and hands-on opportunities for community engagement.
CHC welcomes Dr Antipas as he preaches at our Emerge services and the Young Adult Retreat. Ahead of his arrival, City News brings you an interview we conducted with Dr Antipas last November.
City News: Dr Antipas, you are an academic, but we understand you only started reading when you were in the third grade. Please tell us about your journey to becoming a leading scholar in Pentecostalism.
Dr Antipas Harris: My dad is a pastor, and also, he taught English in high school. His son—me—struggled in the public schools. I struggled because I couldn’t learn to read, and my math skills were really bad. But I had a deep desire, as young as five years old, for ministry. I just love the church.
So my dad decided to pull me out of the public school and start a Christian school at our church primarily out of his concern for me. But also, he was concerned about all the kids in the church.
So when I went to the private school, and I had to start all over again because I couldn’t read in third grade. But I was fascinated. It was a blessing that my dad started the Christian school. Because not only did I have the one-on-one support, but also, the school introduced me to missionaries.
We were required to learn how to read novels. And those novels were missionary stories. And so I forced myself to learn to read because I was fascinated about missionaries. And it was like when I read, I can enter into their world. I can understand it and I can see what they were talking about. And I felt called to it—it was just as real as an embodied experience. That stuck with me all of my young life.
There were missionaries that went to schools. I remembered the schools, particularly Yale, because that was where Jonathan Edwards and David Brainerd went. So I always thought I would like to go to Yale one day, but that was sort of buried in my head. I already had learning challenges and I didn’t have any connections, so it was wishful thinking on my part. Long story short, I ended up going to Yale.
Was it a huge struggle with lots of studying to get into Yale?
No. So when I finished studying in the private school at the church, I went to LaGrange College to study music. That was a connection into my childhood that I even went to college for music! Because I could play the piano since I was two—in that sense, I was a child prodigy. When I graduated from high school, of course, I was going to go to college and I was a musician at the church. I had a creative mind, so perhaps I could make money with music as a producer. Or maybe I could test the water of going to study religion. I had been preaching since I was 15, so I thought maybe I could take a religion class. My professors convinced me that I could get a PhD one day. With that, I could start a Bible School and get to teach Theology. So, I went ahead and did a double major—Creative Music Technology and Religion.
I graduated and went to seminary at Candler School of Theology at Emory University. They required us to do a contextual education experience, and I chose to do it in the prisons. Every week, I went into the women’s prison and counselled women, directed their choir during Sunday morning service, preached there, laid hands and saw their lives change. And all of a sudden, I felt like I was a missionary in the prisons, because these folks, they had bad, bad backgrounds, many of them have not been to church before. They came to Christ in prison. It felt like I was in the mission field.
Then I thought, Okay, this is formational for me, theologically. So I graduated, and I wound up going to Yale to study Missions and Biblical Studies. Now, this is the Yale that I studied about, I read about as a little boy. So, dreams do come true.
My whole family took me up to Yale because they were all excited.
Note: Dr Antipas has a Bachelor of Arts from LaGrange College, Master of Divinity from Emory University, Master of Sacred Theology from Yale, Doctor of Ministry from Boston University and a Doctor of Philosophy from St. Thomas University.
How about your dream to be a missionary?
After teaching at Regent University for 10 years, I got my tenure. I resigned to start Urban Renewal Center. I wanted to be a pastor for the city: take all my mission training and turn it into an urban mission. I am doing what I dreamt of doing when I was a little boy. I am an urban missionary with Urban Renewal Center.
What makes you so inclined towards the Gen Z?
Well, partly because they (the Global Pentecostal Summit) asked me to write on this. But the other part is, I’ve read a lot about this generation from Pew Research Center.
Studies have shown that the millennials, which came before Gen Z, were the most spiritual of all generations. But they were not the most religious, in the sense that they disassociate from faith communities, but they claim—more than previous generations—to be more spiritual.
Gen Z has become the most prominent group of “Nones”: they’re not atheist and they are also not committed to a church. Many of them are children of millennials, who are spiritual but not religious, and so millennials have kids and they are just more of the same.
I teach at Old Dominion University, which is a secular university. I teach Religion and Philosophy, and in my courses, topics like “Death and Meaning”. To engage the students on the subject of life and death, and for them to think deeply about what it is they actually believe is quite instructive. Many of whom don’t have a religious point of reference as to life after death. Or what does it mean to live and be happy? As Christians, we talk about Christ being the abundance of life in Him. But they don’t have that as a framework.
So I bring in religious perspectives, and I talk about Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam—I just talk about all of the perspectives. Then I say, as a Christian, this is what my framework is, not withstanding. You can have whatever framework you like. But all classes are different. But there was one class that stands out in my mind now, because most of the students were fascinated with death. In that class, probably 90 percent of the students were pansexual gender-fluid, not to make necessarily a connection between the two. So one of the things that I’m going to highlight about Gen Z is that they’re mysteriously searching. They’re searching for meaning, yes, but they also searching for belonging, and searching for purpose.
And if the church can enter into that space of the search—which is quite ambivalent—we can meet their needs.
You know, the verdict is still out. Gen Z has a love-hate relationship with the digital age.
They struggle—like all generations, consumer generations— with mental health. But Gen Z gets the brunt of it. So they’ve live a lot of life by the time they’re 12. And many of them don’t find life very inviting, so suicidality is high.
Research shows that many of them are optimistic about the future, but it also shows the high suicidality. For one minute, they’re optimistic; the next minute, the optimism goes out of the window. So it is a very short-lived optimism.
What would you say to our youth leaders, such that we can be relevant to Gen Z?
I think we’ve got to get to include them. One of the things I talked about at the Pentecostal Summit is the children of Issachar: understanding the times, and discerning what we must do. And so that’s what we need, we need the gift of Issachar.
You are not Gen Z, but Gen Z is big on your mind. How do you become relevant to them?
Part of it is I’m teaching classes with all Gen Zs. They are almost my test case.
What strikes them? I’m always learning. They are learning from me, but I’m also learning from them. And there are those who can relate to me, and I always try to see why. And for those that don’t, why don’t they? Most of the time, the ones that don’t, they’ve got too much going on in their lives, it’s so distracting.
The level of distraction for Gen Z is very different than distractions for my generation. The amount of life that Gen Z is experiencing, it took us 30 to 40 years to get it. Too many things are coming at them at once, whether it’s digital, or whether it’s the fact that the traditional family is no longer as strong as it used to be. So that’s what I mean by that at a young age, they bear a lot of life. Historically, youths share that with the family, but now, they have to try to process it all very fast.
What would you say to Gen Z today?
I think we want Gen Z to know that we don’t just care about them, we want to include them. This is so important. Traditional church empowers youth leaders to care about them, to do all these programmes for them and expect them to come and enjoy it.
But Gen Z wants to be in leadership. When you do that, you can’t expect it to be the way it would be, if Gen Z was not leading. It is going to be whatever it is within leadership, because their leadership skills are not as strong as we expect them to be, and it can be a little bit chaotic. The norms are different. We (previous generations) are organised in a different type of way than they are.
To help make the Gen Z understand that they matter is different from sort of a parental approach. I used to be a youth leader years ago, and my youth leaders come at it with this sort of top-down approach and Gen Z resists this.
So how do you talk to a Gen Z, avoiding the top-down approach?
I would say: “You are important and I need you to be a part of what I’m doing. I need you to advise, I need you to help me figure out what we should do. I need you to help me communicate the message to other Gen Zs.”
I’m saying “Come here. This is what we’re doing.”
They’ve got to feel a sense of ownership of it. And the only way they can feel ownership, is when you respect their opinion. There is no single opinion; there are a lot of opinions. Sometimes there are competing opinions, because the opinion doesn’t matter as much as the fact that they feel like they’re hurt.
Does a parent need to have this same approach?
That’s a little bit different because being a parent is different from being a youth. And I think we have to make sure that’s two different things.
I will say though, as I research Gen Z around the world, that the brokenness in traditional family is becoming an issue. It looks different in different parts of the world, but it is the same thing. Because of the brokenness in the family, parents almost have to re-engage in the way that I’m talking about.
Relating to a Gen Z as a parent is very difficult. On the one hand, you don’t want to be a buddy and, on the other hand, if you come off too strong as a parent, you disconnect from them. So you’ve got to find the balance.
I think I understand the way Gen Z thinks. When they are 11, you might be able to get across as more fraternal. But as they get older, because of the influence of their peers, the relationship has to shift a little bit.
What do you feel that the Lord is saying about the next Pentecostal movement?
I believe the next move of God is going to be what we’re experiencing now, which is the scholar as a part, an integrated part of the life of the Spirit in the church.
I say that in juxtaposition to the ’90s. There were a lot of conferences everywhere. But I think now it’s gonna be people having a lot of questions, Gen Z in particular. They have deep questions: questions about sexuality, questions about life, questions about purpose, belonging, “Do I belong? Am I good enough? What makes me good enough?” Those deep anthropological questions which are kind of theological: “Who am I? What am I called to do? And where am I going? What is good? Does God care about me as a person?”
These are the questions that scholars bring to the conversation, not necessarily to say, “Let me tell you who you are”, but to bring up the question. Sometimes, the power is in the questioning itself, and the fact that we will raise that question without rushing to a Scripture to answer it.
In the Pentecostal Conference, I observed how many young people there were. I saw one of the young persons reading the paper and I knew they have questions and are trying to figure it out. They have questions, and sometimes you need to scholar to raise the question.
